The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (38 page)

A 21
^st
century jihadist we’ve already met, Seif Al-Din Al-Ansari, writing in al-Qaeda’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t online magazine, Al-Ansar, declared in 2002 that, “The elements of the collapse of Western civilization are proliferating…In spite of all the characteristics of power at their command, these infidel states are no more than a handful of creatures on the speck of dust called Planet Earth….Allah told us of the certainty of the annihilation of the infidels…by means of the Muslim group, which would, in accordance with the Islamic commandment…torture them…The question now on the agenda is, how is the torture Allah wants done at our hands to be carried out?”
⁹⁷¹
The answer to that question may be easy now that Allah has given Islam’s warriors what the Qur’an calls “the fire whose fuel is Men and Stones”
⁹⁷²
… the fire of nuclear weaponry.
^973
,
974

***

[^^does this belong up front?]

Those who want to “annihilate” us are not madmen. They're rational and they're something more--they're idealists. They want to liberate you and me. They want to free us. As they see it, you and I were made by Allah, by God. We were given everything we have by Him. Since we are His creations, we will only experience true justice and peace if we live by His laws and are enlightened by His truths. What are those laws and truths? The ones that God himself gave to Mohammed in the seventh century.

Militant Islam is out to save you and me in an even more profound way. If we are tricked into following false laws, believing in false gods, and sticking to what Osama bin Laden calls false "opinions, orders [and] theories"
⁹⁷⁵
, we will go to an unspeakably painful hell. Our earthly life is but a brief interlude, a brief gift, a brief test to see if we can follow God's path. But hell and heaven are forever. Militant Islam wants to save you so you can spend the time that really matters, the time that lasts the longest, the time from your death to the Day Of Judgement, in the luxurious upper rooms of paradise. Only if your eyes are opened to the legacy of Mohammed, only if you are persuaded to drop all other "opinions, orders, theories and religions" can Islam save you.

What happens if you stubbornly refuse Islam? What happens if you can not be won over to the light? You must be wiped out. Why? To keep you from corrupting the minds of others and dragging them down to hell with you. When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threw a press conference in September 2006 to report on his visit to Senegal, Cuba, Venezuela and the United Nations, he said, "And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism."
⁹⁷⁶
He’d also made the same word-for-word statement the previous year.
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It is very unlikely that Ahmadinejad was proposing a thought experiment. He was proposing a reality that Iran and its fellow Moslem states would be able to achieve with their coming weaponry.

Islam has called for the annihilation of the Jews for close to 1,400 years. But why eradicate those of us who live in America? My suspicion is this. Militant Moslems like Iran's president Ahmadinejad see that Europe is eager to appease the Moslem world, eager to bow to Islam's will. Europe can be saved. Europe can be brought into the fold of Islam. But America stubbornly insists on promoting its Satanic culture, a culture that will drag millions down to the pit of fire.

Hit America with a few nuclear weapons, take out New York, Washington, and a handful of other American coastal cities, and those left in America will embrace Islam. As one Islamic speaker, Nasser Bin Suleiman Al-Omar, puts it, “America is collapsing from within…Islam is advancing according to a steady plan, to the point that tens of thousands of Muslims have joined the American army and Islam is the second largest religion in America. Today, America is defeated. I have no doubt, not even for a minute, that America is on its way to destruction.” What's more, the weak-willed Europeans will finally see the truth and will accept second-rate status in something god promised Mohammed long ago--Islam's global empire.

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As a leader of Hezbollah said as long ago as 1986, "Don't believe that we want an Islamic republic in Lebanon. ...What Hezbollah wants is a world Islamic republic."
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The idea that militant Islam could take over the world may seem preposterous. But militant Islam has two edges other cultures lack. The memes stamped in by its founder effect are war-oriented. They call for following the example of a man called “Mohammed the Conqueror”
⁹⁷⁹
, a prophet with very little pity, a meme-maker who led his people in 65 military campaigns, campaigns of conquest.
Memes, superorganisms, and the pecking order. These are the forces driving today's militant Islam. These are the forces that have driven Islam's astonishing conquests since 624 AD.

Osama bin Laden, the killer of Theo Van Gogh, the Islamic street demonstrators in London, the Moslem teenage militants killing Buddhists in Thailand, and Iran's puppet, Hezbollah, are working overtime on behalf of a hungry meme out to remake the world in its image. A new world. A world globally Internetted and World-Wide-Webbed. A world of mega-organisms ripe for the Islamic meme of one planet, one government,
⁹⁸⁰
one-God, and one prophet.

But both dar el Islam, the abode of Islam, and dar el Harb—our civilization—are [^^check for repetitions of Lucifer Principle] mass minds on the move, driven by a mix of new and ancient dreams.

Moslem critics are right about the West’s bloody track record. Our two World Wars in the 20
^th
Century killed a combined total of roughly 70 million human beings.
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Our two great social experiments—the Marxist-Leninist transformation of Russia and the Marxist Revolution of Mao Zedong in China, a revolution based on the philosophy of a German Westerner—Karl Marx--killed another 80 million. With our atomic bombs, we Westerners wiped out two Japanese cities in less time than it takes to read this page. We warred to control the lives of others in Korea, Viet Nam, and in Algeria, where the French fought from 1954 to 1962 to quash a local War of Independence that cost between 350,000 and 1.5 million lives.
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Even our conventional weapons in World War II produced fire storms that sucked the oxygen out of the lungs of citizens miles from the center of impact and roasted them alive as they suffocated and died.

Like nearly every human tribe that’s ever existed, we have been violent, destructive, and greedy for land, wealth, prestige, and power. We have been barbarians.

But the West has developed something that Islam never achieved—an internal self-correction
⁹⁸³
mechanism, a protest industry
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. In the mid-1780s, the West began a mass movement to stop one of its own nightmarish crimes against humanity…slavery
⁹⁸⁵
. A mere 20 years later, the anti-slavery movement began to achieve its purpose. The British Parliament passed The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act on March 25, 1807
⁹⁸⁶
. Then, in the 1890s, the West developed a highly organized anti-Imperialist movement,
⁹⁸⁷
a movement that eventually forced the nations of Europe to abandon almost all of the foreign lands they had taken.

The West did all of this, in part, because of the Founder Effect. Islam uses the Founder Effect to imprison itself. It dictates that there is just one prophet
⁹⁸⁸
, and his name is Mohammed. There is just one pattern of personality that all must follow, Mohammed’s pattern. In the West we allow ourselves many founders, many role models. The most vividly-remembered prophet in our pantheon of founding figures was not a warrior and a political leader like Mohammed. He was a man who believed profoundly in ministering to the poor, in turning the other cheek, and in rendering to Caesar what was Caesar’s—in separation of church, faith, and state. Above all else, he believed in compassion. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy,”
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he said. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”
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The most savage things he ever did were to send a herd of pigs over a cliff and to curse a fig tree.

That founder was Jesus. And his example stood behind the activists who kicked off the anti-slavery movement in the 18
^th
century, the anti-war movement in the mid-19
^th
century
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, the anti-Imperialist movement in the late 19
^th
century, and the human rights movement that began with these words in 1776: “all men are created equal”.
⁹⁹²

Paul Kengor, a political scientist and historian of the role of religion in the White House, claims that Jesus was a vivid figure in the imaginations of all 43 American presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush.
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He was alive in their guiding memes and he was alive in their pictures of the invisible world. No matter what crimes these men may have committed against humanity, Jesus was somewhere in their minds saying “no”.

It is not easy for me to admit this. I’m a Jew and an atheist. Jesus was, to me, just another nice Jewish kid—not a man in whose name my ancestors or yours should have been killed. But the fact is that in his name you and I have gained many of our freedoms.

Ironically, once the West got a conscience, it used its troops to protect Arabs and Islam. In World War I, Lawrence of Arabia, who jumped nine feet onto a camel’s back earlier in this book, helped create the modern sense of Arab identity and solidarity. He united the bickering Arab tribes of the Hijaz, the stretch of sand, stone, and mountains in which Mohammed lived, so they could fight another group of Moslems who held them in an iron grip—the inheritors of the Ottoman Empire, the folks we call “the Turks”.