The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (36 page)

23 Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad
, by ‘Ali Dashti; Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1994. ‘Ali Dashti (1896–1982) was an Iranian Muslim who had the courage to look honestly at Muhammad’s career and write openly about the Prophet’s violence, the non-miraculous character and moral defects of the Qur’an, and much more. For this, although he was over eighty, he was imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately murdered by thugs in the employ of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

If you leave Islam, you must die

Why did they have to take this extraordinary precaution? Because, as we have seen, in traditional Islamic law, when a Muslim converts to another faith, it can bring a death sentence. This is not, mind you, “extremist” Islam. It is the Islamic
mainstream
, based on a statement of Muhammad: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”
¹⁸
It’s also based on a statement of the Qur’an: “But whoever of you recants and dies an unbeliever, his works shall come to nothing in this world and the next, and they are the companions of the fire for ever” (Qur’an 2:217). This has been widely interpreted by traditional Muslim commentators as giving sanction to the death penalty for apostates—which they derive from the verse’s assertion that the apostate’s work will “come to nothing in this world” as well as the next.

When converts are not killed, they are otherwise pressured. The organizer of the conference has felt this firsthand: “I was called by my embassy and told I’d better repent or I could not go back home with my family.” Another convert reported that she had not yet told her family that she had become a Christian. “I know they’re going to disown me,” she said, “if they don’t kill me.” In a free America, you say?

What happens when the law looks the other way

These people have to live in fear because of the long-entrenched and continuing unwillingness on the part of American authorities to face up to the realities of Islam. Law enforcement officials either haven’t known or haven’t cared that Islam mandates the death penalty for those who leave the religion. If they knew that this provision even existed, they probably assumed that Muslims who settled in the United States would discard it and accept the values of American society.

Many have, but an unknown number haven’t, and it is time this fact is acknowledged. This is especially tough for Westerners, however, since the concept of apostasy is so foreign to today’s secular society. Although the Falls Church converts are Christians, this is not solely a Christian issue. Freedom of conscience should be a concern of everyone who professes an interest in human rights. The human rights organizations should be the first to defend these people. American government and law enforcement officials should rush to their aid in the name of freedom.

But because of the PC stranglehold on discussion of Islam, and because shady groups like CAIR have managed to claim victim status for American Muslims, neither the rights groups nor the government have yet noticed that the converts even exist.

Chapter 18

THE CRUSADE WE MUST FIGHT TODAY

W
hen asked at the end of Pope John Paul II’s long pontificate if the Catholic Church might change its stance on Islam, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, replied, “There may be a greater insistence on religious liberty. But I don’t think we’re going to go to war. The times of the Crusades are over.”
¹

Guess what?

• Europe could be Islamic by the end of the twenty-first century.
  
• In order to defeat the international jihadist threat, the U.S. must reconfigure its alliances on the basis of where countries stand on Islamic jihad.
  
• Converts from Islam to Christianity must live in fear even in the United States.
  

This surely goes without saying. Despite the fevered fantasies of jihadists around the world, the Crusades of the history books are definitely over. But the jihad that the Crusaders faced is not over. The thousand-year-old Muslim dream of an Islamic Europe is definitely not over. In fact, in a certain sense, it is now closer to fulfillment than at any time in history.

The Islamization of Europe

Will tourists in Paris in the year 2105 take a moment to visit the “mosque of Notre Dame” and the “Eiffel Minaret?” Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they failed to do at the time of the Crusaders: conquer Europe. How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-filled career to be disingenuous about Islamic radicalism and terrorism, forthrightly told the German newspaper
Die Welt
: “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.”
²

Or maybe sooner: If demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by middle of this century. Meanwhile, these growing Muslim minorities are increasingly assertive and disruptive. Consider some recent indicators from other European nations:

Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmö, has become a Middle East outpost in Scandinavia. A quarter of the city’s population is now Muslim, and that number is rapidly growing. Nor are the Muslims of Malmö inclined to be peaceful and tolerant. Even the police are afraid: “If we park our car it will be damaged—so we have to go very often in two vehicles, one just to protect the other vehicle,” reported a police officer in Malmö. Meanwhile, Swedish ambulance drivers will not enter some areas of Malmö unless police accompany them.
³

The Nordgårdsskolen in Aarhus, Denmark, has become the first Dane-free school. The students now come entirely from Denmark’s fastest-growing constituency: Muslim immigrants.
⁴

Also in Denmark, the Qur’an is now required reading for all upper-secondary school students.
⁵
There should be nothing wrong with requiring students to read the Qur’an, but given the current ascendancy of political correctness on the Continent, it is unlikely that critical perspectives will be included.

Pakistani Muslim leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed gave an address at the Islamic Cultural Center in Oslo. He was allowed into the country despite that fact that, according to Norway’s
Aftenposten
, he “has earlier made flattering comments about Osama bin Laden, and his party, Jamaat-e-Islami, also has hailed al-Qaeda members as heroes.”
⁶
In Norway, he declined to answer questions about whether he thought homosexuals should be killed.
⁷

Elsewhere in Europe, jihad is taking a more violent form. Dutch officials have uncovered at least fifteen separate terrorist plots, all aimed at punishing the Netherlands for its 1,300 peacekeeping troops in Iraq.
⁸
And in Spain, Moroccan Muslims, including several suspected participants in the March 11 Madrid bombings, took control of a wing in a Spanish prison in fall 2004. From there, they broadcast Muslim prayers at high volume, physically intimidated non-Muslim prisoners, hung portraits of Osama bin Laden, and boasted, “We are going to win the holy war.” What was the guards’ response? They asked the ringleaders to please lower the volume on the prayers.
⁹

What Europe has long sown it is now reaping. In her book
Eurabia,
Bat Ye’or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today, “Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a ‘civilization of dhimmitude,’ i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing.”
¹⁰

If Western Europe does become Islamized, as demographic trends suggest, before too long America will be facing a world that is drastically different and more forbidding than it is today.

What is to be done?

Archbishop Fitzgerald is right; the time of the Crusades is long past. The idea that a modern pope would summon Christians to a military defense of the Holy Land or anything else against Muslims is inconceivable. It is even more inconceivable that a significant portion of the Western world would respond to such a call. Not only is the West riven with a disunity that makes the fissures of Crusader times seem like love fests, but there is little or no unanimity of outlook and purpose. While America fights a war on terror that has included the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq, France and Germany have pursued a different strategy, attempting to establish the European Union as a global counter-weight to the United States—a strategy that involves close cooperation with the Arab League.

The situation in Europe has grown quite grave, and something must be done. It may be that the world needs a new Crusade, though of a kind different from those led by Richard the Lionhearted and Godfrey of Bouillon. We have seen in this book that the Crusades were primarily an act of defense against the encroachment of Islam. In that sense a new Crusade is not only possible but desirable.

Am I calling for a war between Christianity and Islam? Certainly not. What I am calling for is a general recognition that we are already in a war between two vastly different ideas of how to govern states and order societies, and that in this struggle the West has nothing to apologize for and a great deal to defend. Indeed, the struggle against sharia is nothing less than a struggle for universal human rights, a concept that originated in the West and is denied by Islam. Everyone in the fractured and fractious West—Christians, Jews, other religious believers, atheist humanists—ought to be able to agree that this is a concept worth defending, even if they disagree about its particulars.