Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (11 page)

The author Aldous Huxley, who lived in north Africa in the 1920s, attributed many of the pathologies plaguing Islamic societies to Islam’s deadening fatalism:

About the immediate causes of things—precisely how they happen—they seem to feel not the slightest interest. Indeed, it is not even admitted that there are such things as immediate causes: God is directly responsible for everything. “Do you think it will rain?” you ask pointing to menacing clouds overhead. “If God wills,” is the answer. You pass the native hospital. “Are the doctors good?” “In our country,” the Arab gravely replies, in the tone of Solomon, “we say that doctors are of no avail. If Allah wills that a man die, he will die. If not, he will recover.” All of which is profoundly true, so true, indeed, that it is not worth saying. To the Arab, however, it seems the last word in human wisdom.... They have relapsed—all except those who are educated according to Western methods—into pre-scientific fatalism, with its attendant incuriosity and apathy. They are the “dull inquirers who, demanding an account of the phenomena of a watch, shall rest satisfied with being told that it is an engine made by a watchmaker.” The result of their satisfaction with this extremely unsatisfactory answer is that their villages look like the ruins of villages, that the blow-flies sit undisturbedly feeding on the eyelids of those whom Allah has predestined to blindness, that half their babies die.
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According to Islam, there is only one assurance that a Muslim will go straight to paradise: martyrdom. However, the concept of Islamic martyrdom is fundamentally different from Christian martyrdom, which refers to suffering unto death for the sake of faith. In contrast, the Koran says that Allah promises his garden to those who “fight for His cause, slay, and be slain. Such is the true pledge which He has made them in the Torah, the Gospel and the Koran.”
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Islamic martyrs are not those who suffer and die for the truth, but those who are killed while making others suffer and die. “The hill of the dead grows higher,” wrote Salman Rush-die in
The Satanic Verses,
a book that caused the author to spend decades hiding from offended Islamic fanatics seeking to kill him. “In the dark doorways of the city there are mothers with covered heads, pushing their beloved sons into the parade, go,
be a martyr, do the needful, die.”
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Throughout history, Islam has brought poverty, social strife, backwardness, intolerance, and tyranny to societies where it is practiced. This trend continues today, as the curse of Islam hampers the quest for freedom and democracy in the Middle East.

The so-called “Arab Spring” of 2011 began when a policewoman in Sidi Bouzid, 190 miles south of the Tunisian capital of Tunis, confiscated a vegetable cart from Mohamed Bouazizi. She reportedly slapped and humiliated the 26-year-old street vendor, who went to a police station to complain. After officers refused to hear Bouazizi’s grievance, he poured fuel over himself outside the station and set himself on fire.
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It was 10:30 a.m. on December 17, 2010—the beginning of the end of numerous despotic Arab dictatorships.

Bouazizi’s self-immolation provoked an outburst of pent-up political and social frustration in Tunisia. Young liberal reformers seeking freedom, justice, the rule of law, and democracy took to the streets. Propelled by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools, unrest rapidly spread to Tunis and other cities. Bouazizi died in a Tunis hospital on January 4, 2011. Ten days later, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali resigned after twenty-three years in power and fled to Saudi Arabia. The success of the Tunisian uprising, covered extensively by al Jazeera, broke through barriers of fear that had long possessed Arab populations, triggering a wave of protests across north Africa and the Middle East.

The largest demonstrations were held in Egypt, where in early February over a quarter million demonstrators gathered in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square and refused to leave until they succeeded, on February 11, 2011, in ending Hosni Mubarak’s 29-year reign as “president.”
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In Libya, a civil war erupted, provoking Western intervention that helped rebels put an end to Moamar Gaddafi’s 42-year rule. Uprisings, revolution, and civil war also hit Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and other countries.

Many Arab people yearn for freedom—this is only natural. However, their hopes of achieving freedom through the Arab Spring will be dashed. Sadly, the freedom-loving youths who triggered the revolts were facing off not only against oppressive autocratic dictatorships—a battle they won in Tunisia and Egypt—but also against “the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries,” that is, against the culture and ideology of Islam itself—and that battle they cannot win.

I have travelled many times to the Middle East, visiting Tunisia, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Indonesia. I know the potential these countries and peoples have. If only they could liberate themselves from Islam, they, too, could become prosperous and free nations. Islam is the problem—and we should not be afraid to say so.

A 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 59 percent of Egyptians prefer democracy to any other form of government. While that result may seem promising, it is negated by the people’s widespread support for Islamic customs that undermine a democratic society; 54 percent support mandatory gender segregation in the workplace, 82 percent believe adulterers should be stoned, 84 percent want the death penalty for apostates, and 77 percent insist thieves should be flogged or have their hands cut off, as is prescribed in the Koran. Overall, an overwhelming 85 percent say that Islam’s influence on politics is good.
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Unfortunately for Egypt’s youthful revolutionaries, they were immediately outmaneuvered by Islamic activists. On February 18, 2011, the Islamic cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi led 200,000 people in the first post-Mubarak Friday prayer at Tahrir Square. “The revolution isn’t over. It has just started,” he told the massive crowd. As the
Christian Science Monitor
commented, the giant rally was “a reminder that political Islam is likely to play a larger role in Egypt than it has for decades.”
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Indeed, Egyptian women soon felt the implications of the resurgence of Islam, which had been somewhat suppressed by Mubarak. On March 8, 2011, International Women’s Day, 200 women who were demonstrating for women’s rights in Tahrir Square were beat up and dragged away by a group of bearded Islamic zealots.
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This is the new Egypt: on Monday, people demonstrate for freedom; on Tuesday, the same people assault women because they, too, demand freedom. This is the curse of Islam.

Egypt’s Coptic Christians felt the implications as well. As Islam surged with the overthrow of Mubarak, Egypt witnessed escalating Islamic attacks on Coptic communities, including attacks by Egyptian army personnel.
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According to a September 2011 report by the Egyptian Union of Human Rights Organizations (EUHRO), nearly 100,000 Coptic Christians emigrated since March 2011. “They are coerced into [emigrating] by threats and intimidation by hard line [Islamic radicals] and the lack of protection they are getting from the Egyptian regime,” EUHRO director Naguib Gabriel said.
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Throughout the Middle East, in the dark doorways of the revolution, major dangers loom. In the wake of the upheavals, the political vacuum in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere has empowered jihadists.

In February 2011, Italy’s Foreign Minister Franco Frattini voiced alarm at reports that anti-Gaddafi rebels had taken control of the Libyan city of Benghazi. “I’m extremely concerned about the self-proclamation of the so-called Islamic Emirate of Benghazi,” Frattini told reporters.
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It was unknown at the time who exactly the Libyan rebels were, but it was clear their ranks included veteran jihadists. Nevertheless, less than a month later, the United Nations and NATO decided to intervene in the conflict on the rebels’ side, leading to the extraordinary phenomenon of the United States Air Force fighting alongside Islamic extremists who had earlier battled against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Western intelligence officers also warned that extremist groups had pillaged the Libyan Army’s military arsenals and acquired large stocks of sophisticated weapons.
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“The wildly spreading instability that has accompanied the Arab Spring is custom-made for the jihadists’ needs,” warned Christopher Dickey,
Newsweek’
s Middle East regional editor.
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Israeli counter-terrorism specialist Boaz Ganor fears the Arab Spring might ultimately lead to a biting Arab Winter, just as the Iranian Revolution of 1979 turned the most developed Muslim country into an Islamic theocracy. “Democracy is not only about free elections,” says Ganor. “Democracy is a state of mind and a set of values. Democracy is human rights and women’s rights.”
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When this state of mind is absent, when a country has hardly any civil institutions, when there is no rule of law and no culture of tolerance, a disciplined movement of ruthless ideologues will easily hijack the democratic process.

The bottom line, unfortunately, is this: there can be no freedom in countries where Islam is dominant.

Islam is primarily a political ideology, not a religion.

“Although we carelessly speak of Islam as a ‘religion,’ that word carries many overtones of the special history of western Europe,” wrote the historian J. M. Roberts in his authoritative book
The Triumph of the West.
“The Muslim is primarily a member of community, the follower of a certain way, an adherent to a system of law, rather than someone holding particular theological views.”
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“Islam is an ideology. In the Western world, it was not called a ‘religion’ until the twentieth century,” explains Hugh Fitzgerald. “Rather, it was a ‘faith’ or, to many Western travelers, a ‘fanatical faith.’ Islam does contain rituals of worship—the so-called Five Pillars of Islam.... These duties are to be performed. They do not require, nor do they promote, moral development.”
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Egyptian-born ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish, the daughter of an Egyptian Islamic “martyr,” writes, “Those who confine their observance to the Five Pillars become what the West calls ‘moderate’ Muslims.... But what a Muslim says in his prayers and time of prayers is not a choice for a Muslim who must recite what is ordered at specific times.”
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Islam as a whole, says Darwish, is “a political and legal system of totalitarian control.... The most flaring evidence that Islam is hardly a ‘religion’ is in its apostasy law—the order to kill those who leave it. That immediately moved Islam from the realm of religion to the realm of totalitarian political ideology.”
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It is crucial for the West to understand why Islam is not a true religion—it is because Islam rejects the principle of voluntarism that is common to all authentic religions. Whereas Christianity and other religions lay obligations only on their own members who have voluntarily joined the faith, Islam levels commands even at non-Muslims and orders them to submit.

Darwish also points to another characteristic of authentic religions that Islam lacks: it does not teach the golden rule—that we should treat others as we would have them treat us. Instead, Islam institutionalizes inequality, sanctioning discrimination against certain groups of people such as women and non-Muslims.