The Boston Marathon bombing is the latest episode of violent Islamic jihad - a campaign to wage war on non-believers of Islam to convert them to Islam, or to subjugate them, or to kill them. Globally, incidents of Islamic terrorism since 9/11 alone have passed the 20,000 mark. Islam has been at war with the West, and in particular with the U.S. and Israel, for decades, if one does not count the centuries Muslims have raided European coasts for slaves, estimated to be around two million, and captured American merchant vessels in the 18thand early 19th centuries, and enslaved their crews or held them for ransom. The U.S. has been the subject of dozens of attacks here and abroad.
Violence is in Islam's DNA. Mohammad died in 632. His successors continued his jihad until all of the Arabian Peninsula and Armenia were under Islamic rule. In 634 the Muslims invaded Palestine. In 639 they invaded Egypt and took Alexandria. In 711 the Muslims invaded and conquered Spain, but were turned back by the Franks at the battle of Tours in 732 from conquering the rest of Europe.
Obeying the will of Allah and wishing to fulfill the purported prophecy of Mohammad, Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, was unsuccessfully besieged twice by Muslim caliphs, between 674 and 678, and between 717 and 718. When the Empire collapsed into anarchy, Islam rushed in to fill the vacuum in the Middle East, just as rampaging barbarian Huns and Visigoths filled the vacuum left in Europe by the collapse of the Roman Empire. Constantinople finally fell to the Islamic Ottoman Turks in 1453.
While Europe was embarking on the Renaissance (with its respect for reason and life here on earth), which in turn spawned the Enlightenment (with its love of science and technology), Islam held fast to the Dark Ages. Islam's demand for blind acceptance of authority was never defanged by the Renaissance. Its prescription for hell on earth was never uplifted by the Enlightenment. As opposed to other religions of the time, it was never dragged, kicking and screaming, to accept the separation of religion and state. When Ethan Allen, who, like many of the Founders, was a Deist, penned his pamphlet, Reason: The Only Oracle of Man, that idea never reached the Islamic world.
Brutality and violence are endemic to Islam's history because it rejects on principle the only civilized means of settling disputes peacefully: persuasion, debate, discussion, i.e., man's faculty of reason. Islam regards man as a helpless plaything in a chaotic universe ruled by a spiteful, omnipotent, supernatural deity (Allah). The common man must submit to Allah (and his representatives here on Earth) because he is by nature incapable of thinking for himself. Every totalitarian ideology starts by attacking man's faculty of reason. Much is made of the "peaceful" verses in the Koran. But those passages are as irrelevant to Islam's essence as is the fact that Mafia hit men might be ''peaceful'' at a child's birthday party.
Islam uses Sharia law to enslave citizens under a totalitarian state. In practice, Sharia law is a brutal, primitive system which, among its other barbarities, sanctions the murder of Jews, homosexuals, apostates, and adulterous women (Muslim men are usually exempt from punishment for the latter offense); the genital mutilation of girls and women; the enslavement of infidels, otherwise known as kaffirsor dhimmis; the collection of a poll tax, or jizya (a kind of Mafia-style "protection" money) from non-believers; and the use of force to compel obedience and submission to Islam. Sharia sanctions the lashing of innocent women for some undefined "sexual" offense, of a Saudi woman being harassed by Saudi religious police in a Riyadh shopping mall for wearing nail polish, of a Muslim woman being stoned to death in the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, of four homosexuals being hanged in Iran, and the beheading of an apostate in Tunisia for having converted to Christianity. Sharia condones the tribal practice of "honor killing," when a female Muslim "dishonors" the family by becoming "too Western,'' i.e., when she makes independent choices, for example, about who to marry and what she will wear in public.
The Muslim Brotherhood's founder proclaimed: ''It is in the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet."
And this barbarous, totalitarian ideology is being imported to the West. On July 4, 1998, Omar Ahmad, founder in 1994 of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR, allegedly a "civil rights" organization, with over thirty chapters in the U.S.) said: "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other religions, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."
One cause of Islam's successful infiltration is the spread of multiculturalism in the West. Multiculturalism is egalitarianism, which seeks to destroy the best, applied to cultures. It proclaims that no culture is superior to another. In practice, the only way to achieve such equality of results among cultures is to tear down the best, i.e., the West. To achieve equality between the great and the depraved, we must, claim multiculturalists, surrender to Islamic terror and tyranny our freedoms and wealth. After all, say multiculturalists, who are we to claim that it's better to use an airplane for travel than it is to use one for mass murder?
The disease of multiculturalism spreads like this. First it blurs all cultural distinctions, i.e., it performs a kind of value lobotomy on the minds in the West. Then any second-rate, third-rate, or nihilistic cultural "values" rush in to fill the void. One sees examples of this in the demands that the Ground Zero mosque be afforded the same respect as the Iwo Jima monument in Washington D.C., or in the calls for the use of Sharia law instead of Western jurisprudence.
Before the spread of multiculturalism, the Western mind valued Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death," the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence. But those "cultural prejudices" are being wiped clean by multiculturalism. And now, the West's values are being sacrificed to the lowest and worst culture on earth - an Islamic culture that today demands submission to its reign of terror.
Aside from the physical, violent attacks on America and Americans by Islamic jihadists, of equal, if notgreater concern to Americans should be the steady abridgement and incremental "repeal" of the First Amendment or freedom of speech by its enemies in our government and by Islamic advocates such as CAIR and its sister entities. This applies to any and all criticism of Islam, whether it is satirical in any form of expression or scholarly or in newsworthy presentations of facts.
Without the freedom to speak or write, there is no debate, discourse, criticism or truth-telling, and one is forced to submit to Islam in a state of censorship or coerced ignorance or silence.
The West will be safe from Islamic terrorism only if its politicians and intellectuals reject the Koran with its calls for universal slavery and a new Dark Ages, and embrace the Declaration of Independence, a magnificent product of the Enlightenment, with its prescription for individual happiness and freedom.
Copyright 2013 Voltaire Press
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Edward Cline is the author of the popular Sparrowhawk novels. His articles have appeared, among other publications, in The Wall Street Journal, the Journal of Information Ethics, and The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. He is the chief columnist for Rule of Reason, and has contributed featured articles to Family Security Matters, Capitalism Magazine, Breitbart's Big Government.
This is an excerpt from a longer essay published and edited by Voltaire Press. The full essay, which may be freely distributed in electronic or print versions, can be found at: http://muhammadimages.com/essays.php
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