Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (20 page)

We must face the fact that some Muslims believe the Koran—and all its oppressive and murderous commands—must be followed because the book relays the immutable word of Allah himself. It is no use arguing to the Koran’s adherents that Western norms are better or more progressive or more civilized. In their minds, adopting Western values would require them to cease being Muslims. We must not negotiate with Islam, we must
expose
it by denouncing its endless holy wars, ridiculing its violent reaction to criticism or satire, and banning its chief tools of propaganda. Most important, for the sake of defending our civilization, we should keep those who want to impose Sharia law on our societies as far away from our countries as possible.

Islam considers it blasphemy, punishable by death, to investigate the origin of the Koran; we are all meant to believe, without doubt or discussion, that the book was written before the beginning of time by Allah himself, who has the “Mother of the Book” lying on a table in heaven for all eternity. Studies noting the Persian origin of some words in the Koran are considered sacrilege, as they break the Islamic precept that Arabic is the language of Allah, as Allah himself revealed in the Koran when he said, “Thus have We sent this down—an Arabic Koran.”
²⁴

The few scholars who do this kind of work are subject to death threats, causing many to publish under pseudonyms. Indeed, research into the origin of the Koran and the historical figure of Muhammad is even more threatening to Islam than are cartoons of Muhammad. In 1991 Suliman Bashear, a professor at the Palestinian University in Nablus, was thrown from a second-story window by his own students after he questioned the Koran’s historical veracity and argued that Islam developed gradually instead of being revealed by a single prophet.
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More recently, in February 2012, Saudi columnist Hamza Kashgari speculated on Twitter about how he’d act if he met Muhammad personally. To Westerners this seems like perfectly innocent contemplation, but in Saudi Arabia, the comments unleashed frenzied accusations of blasphemy. According to the
Wall Street Journal,
“Clerics and thousands of their followers [used] Twitter, YouTube, email and fax to demand the writer’s execution.” The hysterical response included a deluge of tens of thousands of Tweets that offered bounties for killing Kashgari and posted images of his house. “The speed, number and intensity of messages calling for the death of the writer, Hamza Kashgari, stunned many Saudis,” the
Journal
reported. Personifying the absurdly disproportionate reaction, one cleric appeared on a video “shuddering with sobs in outrage at what he said was Mr. Kashgari’s insult to the Prophet Muhammad.” Kashgari fled the country for Malaysia, where he was promptly arrested at the airport by the Malaysian police and sent back to Saudi Arabia where, according to the
Journal,
“a senior Saudi official said he would likely face a charge of apostasy, which typically carries the death penalty.”
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Muhammad may be sacred in Islam, but we in the West are entitled to critically research his life and legacy, no matter how deeply it “disturbs,” “offends,” or “shocks” the bullies in the Islamic world. In fact, it is our
duty
to undertake these kinds of investigations. We should encourage energetic inquiry into this field and vigorously confront Muslims with the findings. Let them
suffer the truth.

Another prominent Koran expert is a linguist and an expert on Semitic languages who writes under the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg. He lives in Germany and is probably of Lebanese or Syrian origin. Few people know his real identity. According to Luxenberg, the original language of the Koran is not Arabic, but Syro-Aramaic. These languages are closely related, though their words do not necessarily have the same meaning. Supporting Luxenberg’s argument is the fact that Arabic did not turn up as a written language until the late eighth century, 150 years after Muhammad’s death.

Luxenberg read the original text of the Koran as if it had been written in Syro-Aramaic rather than in Arabic. By doing so, he discovered that many obscure parts of the Koran that are inexplicable to Arab commentators (they simply state that only Allah can comprehend them) become meaningful, while other parts of the Koran obtain a different meaning altogether. Take, for example, the Koranic verse promising that martyrs in jihad will receive “wide-eyed houris,” or virgins, in heaven
²⁷
—a verse cited by Islamic radicals to encourage suicide bombings. In Syro-Aramaic, however, the reading refers not to
houris,
but to “white grapes” or “raisins,” which were an iconographic symbol of the Christian hereafter. If Luxenberg’s reading is correct, it means Islamic suicide commandos, who think they are heading to the sexual bliss of a heavenly brothel, will be offered a plate of raisins instead of virgins.

In 2003, when
Newsweek
published an article about Luxenberg’s thesis,
²⁸
the Pakistani and Bangladeshi governments banned the issue. “The article is insulting to the Koran,” the Pakistani Information Minister said.
²⁹

Luxenberg’s thesis is controversial. His suggestion that there was a hiatus in the oral transmission of the Koran and a chronological gap in Muhammad’s biography, however, is shared by other scholars who, elaborating on this assumption, doubt whether the historical Muhammad actually existed, or if he did, whether he did much or any of what is ascribed to him in Islamic scripture. The Muhammad who comes to us from the Islamic holy books might be a composite figure, constructed later to give Arab imperialism a foundational mythos. So far, scholars have undertaken little research into these matters—that’s unsurprising, considering Islam’s violent reaction to unfavorable publicity.

Other Muhammad experts have argued that Muhammad probably did exist as a historical figure. They claim that so many aspects of their prophet’s life are acutely embarrassing for Muslims—such as his marriages to a 9-year-old girl and to his own daughter-in-law—that it is “hard to imagine that a pious hagiographer would have invented” these stories.
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Whether or not the historical Muhammad existed, research into the genesis of Islam is important. Even if Muhammad never existed, 1.5 billion Muslims believe he did.

Consequently, historical, archaeological, and linguistic research into the historical Muhammad and the origins of Islam should be encouraged. It is a potent weapon that could persuade Muslims that the Koran is
not
the literal word of God. This research will help people who were brought up to believe in the basic tenets of Islam to free themselves from their illusions.

We must remember that Islam is not the truth and that we have no obligations to this ideology. We do not have to respect its traditions, convictions, or taboos. We do not have to show deference to its bloody and intolerant history. We should subject its beliefs and arguments to rigorous scrutiny, as we would any other historical claim. Just because Islam may not be able to withstand such scrutiny is no reason to refrain from doing it.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Amerikabomber

America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.

—Woodrow Wilson

O
n September 11, 2001, two al Qaeda operatives, the Egyptian Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi from the United Arab Emirates, crashed their hijacked planes into the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center, killing more than 2,500 people. A third hijacked plane smashed into the Pentagon, slaughtering around 200 more, while hijackers who faced a passenger rebellion deliberately crashed a fourth airliner into a Pennsylvania field, killing all forty passengers.

Standing at approximately 1,362 feet, the World Trade Center skyscrapers were New York’s tallest buildings, having been the tallest buildings in the world until the construction of Chicago’s Sears Tower in 1974. Today, the world’s tallest building is the
Burj Khalifa
(the Caliph Tower) in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The name of the building, which stands at 2,717 feet and houses a mosque on its top floor, proudly refers to the Caliphate, which the 9/11 bombers were serving.

America’s skyscrapers symbolize the country’s economic power, so it’s no coincidence that the nation’s enemies seek to destroy them. Sixty years before the 9/11 attacks, the Nazis had laid similar plots. During World War II, they worked on the
Amerikabomber,
an airplane specially designed to fly suicide missions into Manhattan’s skyscrapers.
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Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments, recalled in his diary, “It was almost as if [Hitler] was in a delirium when he described to us how New York would go up in flames. He imagined how the skyscrapers would turn into huge blazing torches. How they would crumble while the reflection of the flames would light the skyline against the dark sky.”
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The real story of the 9/11 attacks began more than a decade before Atta, al-Shehhi, and their co-conspirators seized control of their doomed flights. The origins of the plot stretch back to November 5, 1990, when El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born American citizen, shot and killed the radical Brooklyn-born Israeli rabbi Meir Kahane in the lobby of Manhattan’s Marriott hotel. After Nosair’s arrest, the FBI discovered forty-seven boxes of documents, maps, and diagrams of buildings—including the World Trade Center towers—in his Brooklyn apartment. One of the documents read, “We must thoroughly demoralize the enemies of Allah. This is to be done by means of destroying and blowing up the towers that constitute the pillars of their civilization, such as... the high buildings they are so proud of.”
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Kahane’s assassin belonged to a group of jihadists who were being trained by al Qaeda member Ali Abdelsoud Mohammed. Nicknamed
al-Amriki
(“the American”), Mohammed was a U.S. Army drill sergeant at Fort Bragg who had stolen classified military information later found in Nosair’s boxes. Like Nosair, Mohammed was an Egyptian-born American citizen. Despite having been discharged from the Egyptian army for extremism, U.S. authorities allowed him to immigrate to America and gain U.S. citizenship. “The FBI had good reasons to be suspicious of Mohammed—if its agents had been paying attention,” writes investigative journalist Rich Miniter in his book
Losing Bin Laden.
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Attending court in Arab attire, Nosair, along with his chanting and screaming supporters outside the courthouse, turned the assassin’s trial into a spectacle. In December 1991, the jury acquitted him of murder, convicting Nosair of the lesser charges of assault and possession of an illegal firearm. Nosair’s lawyer, William Kunstler, a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, later revealed he had succeeded in removing “potential jurors who supported Israel and might have been biased against Mr. Nosair because he is an Arab.” As a consequence, the jury was almost entirely composed of, as Kunstler described them, “third-world people” and “people who were not yuppies or establishment types.” Denouncing the jury’s verdict as “devoid of common sense” and accusing Nosair of “conduct[ing] a rape of this country, of our Constitution and of our laws,” the judge gave him the maximum sentence of up to twenty-two years in jail.
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In February 1993, while Nosair was serving his sentence, Islamic terrorists detonated a car bomb in the parking garage below the World Trade Center’s north tower. Although their goal was to bring down both towers by knocking one into the other, the north tower withstood the blast, which killed six people and injured 1,042. The bombing led to the arrest of the blind Islamic scholar Omar Abdel Rahman and several of his followers.
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The “blind Sheikh” was a graduate in Koranic studies from Cairo’s al-Azhar University. In July 1990, he had been allowed to enter the United States even though his name was on a State Department terrorist watch list. After his arrest, Rahman, too, was defended by Kunstler. On October 1, 1995, Rahman and other members of his gang, including the already-imprisoned Nosair, were convicted of “seditious conspiracy” and sentenced to life imprisonment for plotting to blow up numerous New York landmarks including the Holland Tunnel.

“We know that bin Laden’s terrorists had been planning their outrages for years,” former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote in her book
Statecraft.
“The propagation of their mad, bad ideology—decency forbids calling it a religion—had been taking place before our eyes. We were just too blind to see it. In short, the world had never ceased to be dangerous. But the West had ceased to be vigilant. Surely that is the most important lesson of this tragedy, and we must learn it if our civilisation is to survive.”
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My favorite American president is Ronald Reagan, the man who saved the West from the Soviet threat and helped liberate Eastern Europe and Russia from communism. Reagan understood the evil nature of totalitarianism but also its fatal weakness: the Soviet regime was bankrupted by decades of stagnation and by its inability to innovate. Unable to compete with the West, the Evil Empire imploded. When I was honored to receive the “Hero of Conscience Award” at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in June 2009, I called Reagan “a source of inspiration for many freedom loving people worldwide.”

When the captive peoples of Eastern Europe overthrew communism in 1989, they were inspired by dissidents such as Vladimir Bukovsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel, and others who argued that people have a right and an obligation to “live within the truth”
⁸
—that is, to reject the lies that justified the regimes of their communist masters. As more and more people overcame their fear and began speaking the truth, the legitimacy and power of the regimes crumbled.

Speaking the truth sounds easy, but it is not always so. Sometimes speaking the truth invites physical threats, persecution, or the loss of money or power. That’s why societies must constantly guard against the tendency to replace straightforward truth-telling with more comfortable clichés, euphemisms, and half-truths. “Truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it,” Solzhenitsyn said. “Also, truth is seldom sweet; it is almost invariably bitter.”
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The big lie of Marxism, the one rejected by the revolutionaries of 1989, was that the state can make you happy if you sign away your freedom to it. America has always resisted this delusion, in large part thanks to its pioneering past, which encouraged self-sufficiency and individualism. Americans’ natural opposition to collectivism and socialism, I believe, is the reason why so many illiberal forces, including some Europeans, despise the United States.

After 1989, in many Eastern European countries, the ruling communists simply renamed themselves “Social Democrats” and were happily welcomed into the international networks of Western Europe’s Social Democratic parties. By continuing to lie, some “former” communists even managed to retain or regain power. The most dramatic example was seen in Hungary in 2006, when Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, a member of the Hungarian Socialist Party, which is the rebranded Communist Party, was caught on tape admitting that his party had won elections by lying about the magnitude of the problems facing his nation. “We repeated and repeated that you can be richer, fulfill your dreams, and we can give you happiness and fortune as a gift,” he told party officials. “This is a real lie.”
¹⁰

Vladimir Bukovsky, a former dissident who spent years as a political prisoner in the Soviet Gulag, argues that there should have been a “Nuremberg trial” after the fall of communism. I agree. The purpose of such a trial would not have been to enact revenge on the old “comrades,” but to expose the evil committed by the system they served. “Because we didn’t win the Cold War, it isn’t over,” Bukovsky says. “We were given a chance to win in 1991. To do it we needed a Nuremberg trial, but not a trial of people. In a country like the Soviet Union, if you tried to find all the guilty, you would end up with 19 million people, and who needs another Gulag? This isn’t about punishing individuals. It’s about judging the
system.
” Bukovsky claims this crucial “Nuremberg trial” of communism was never held because it would have revealed “that the West was infiltrated by the Soviets much deeper than we ever thought, but also that there was ideological collaboration between left-wing parties in the West and the Soviet Union.”
¹¹

Thus, although defeated Nazi Germany was subject to de-Nazification, there was no de-Marxification after the fall of communism. And without the public accounting of a trial, people tend to forget how evil communism was. Moreover, the hatred of America and of Western civilization, planted by the Soviets in the minds of the Western intelligentsia, has not been rooted out because it was never comprehensively exposed. We failed to reveal the evil of the entire communist system, and we failed to expose those in the West who collaborated with it by advocating policies of detente, improved relations, relaxation of international tension, or peaceful coexistence—in other words, tolerance of evil.

If we fail to understand the nature of evil, we are doomed to become its next victims. We can only learn to understand it by what Bukovsky calls “the power of memory and acknowledgement.”
¹²
As John F. Kennedy said, “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”
¹³

How is all this relevant to Islam? Simply put, Islam is the communism of today—the worldwide menace that threatens the West and all our rights and freedoms. But our failure to come clean with communism has prevented us from standing up to Islam, trapped as we are in the old communist habit of deceit and doublespeak that used to haunt Eastern Europe and that now haunts all of us.

Because of this failure, we are susceptible to the same old arguments for appeasement, couched in rhetoric about our need to “understand” and “coexist” with Islam. We used to hear that despite all appearances, the Soviets really wanted peace, that if we met them halfway they would reciprocate, that they only asked for a decent measure of respect, and that American “imperialism” was just as bad as Soviet policies, if not worse. Today, we hear the same moral equivalence vis-à-vis Islam. On 9/11, before the jihadists’ victims were even buried, we heard the appeasers blaming America for somehow provoking the attack. These arguments serve one purpose: to destroy our willingness to confront evil.

These lies are often grotesque, yet our elected representatives hardly ever call out their purveyors. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was a rare exception; a month after the 9/11 attacks, he rejected a $10 million donation for New York disaster relief from Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a Saudi hotel and media tycoon, after the prince declared that America “must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack. [America] should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause.... Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis.”
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Giuliani responded, “I entirely reject that statement. There is no moral equivalent for this [terrorist] act. There is no justification for it.” He continued, “To suggest that there’s a justification for [the 9/11 attacks] only invites this happening in the future. It is highly irresponsible and very, very dangerous. And one of the reasons I think this happened is because people were engaged in moral equivalency in not understanding the difference between liberal democracies like the United States, like Israel, and terrorist states and those who condone terrorism. So I think not only are those statements wrong, they’re part of the problem.”
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