Islam: An Egregious Culture

by Michael Devolin, B'nai Elim Canada

Steven Stalinsky, the Executive Director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, wrote in the National Review (May 2004) that, "As the war on terror continues, the voices from the Arab and Muslim world celebrating death over life have been heard more often than those criticizing this philosophy." Judging either by the silence or the non-committal voices of the so-called "moderates" of Islam, we the inexperts-on-Islam, non-Muslims of this world can only surmise that Islam has fixed itself upon the course set out for it by the violent and bloody-minded of this religion. A course pondered and plotted not only by Mohammed himself, but also by many extremists since Islam's conception.

The famous British historian Charles Allen mentions in his book God's Terrorists that present day Wahabbism began long before the Arab Al Wahhab (born in 1702), from whom the Wahabbists get their name, but earlier, in the late 13th century (1263), in what is now Syria, in the heart and mind of the Sunni jurist Sheikh Ibn Taymiyya. Bernard Lewis (whom I consider to be too much an apologist for Islam and too little an objective historian) points out that sectarian violence within this religion's bloody sphere began immediately the Prophet Mohammed died and his so-called heir apparent could not be deemed as being apparent enough. Regardless, wherever Islam takes root, violence is found there, and in effusive measure.

We hear from Islam's apologists, over and over (many of whom will not answer those particular questions which profile the very off-putting and denigrating passages in the Quran about the Jews), that terrorism and bloodshed and everyday mistreatment of non-Muslims are not an integral part of Islam but rather a tangential phenomenon of their religion. We hear that those incriminating manifestations--for example, the public beheadings of both Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg-- are not incriminating at all but rather a culture of the region wherein these manifestations take place and therefore outside of Islam. If this is the case, why is Islam always a contributing factor in these violent manifestations and why are Muslims always involved in these violent manifestations? Moreover, why is Islam and its millions of adherents (clerics included) more concerned with killing their critics than with listening to them. No-one has put it more succinctly than the Tunisian intellectual Al-Afif Al-Akhdar when he wrote, "Why do expressions of tolerance, moderation, rationalism, compromise, and negotiation horrify us [Muslims], but when we hear fervent cries for vengeance, we all dance the war dance?...Why do other people love life, while we love death and violence, slaughter and suicide, and even call it heroism and martyrdom?"

If Islam's apologists are to be believed, we are to blame entire peoples for bad customs and not the religion of Islam. For instance, we are to blame Palestinians for suicide bombings and not those Islamic clerics who teach their congregants that to murder Jewish Israeli children warrants them a place in Paradise; we are to believe that Pakistanis are congenitally and inherently evil for beheading Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg and not Wahabbism's Islamic clerics who, as related by William Gifford Palgrave, teach that all Muslims should "consider everyone save themselves an infidel or a heretic," and "regard the slaughter of an infidel or a heretic as a duty, at least a merit"; we are to believe that all Chechens are born bad and not the Muslim zealots who, led by an Amir and inspired by passages from the Quran, murdered 186 Russian school children (but not before raping some of the young girls) in the small town of Beslan.

I can go on, but I think the reader can see the point I'm making: Islam, and not their provincial culture, has created all this interconnecting obsession with death and destruction and hatred among these many peoples who have been inculcated with its maleficent ideology. Islam's apologists (including their "experts") are simply attempting to obfuscate this obvious peculiarity attendant wherever Islam becomes the dominant religion. Sophists like Harroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star are sweating at the brow, especially since the advent of the internet, in their attempts to conceal the atrocious truth about Islam, which is that Islam emanates violence and bloodshed. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen appellated Islamic violence as "political Islam," which is both ridiculous and irresponsible. Anyone who delves even slightly into the history of Islam will immediately see that this insalubrious religion is culpable for all Islamic terrorism and hatred of the West. No matter how great the good our Western governments can do for the Muslim Middle East, whether militarily, financially, or otherwise, the Muslim Middle East will repay us contumeliously, vis-a-vis Islam's inexorable penchant for terrorism and their religiously taught hatred of everything Judeo-Christian.

Islam is the exclusive and primary source of Wahabbist terrorism-- not Christianity and not Judaism; Islam is the exclusive and primary source of the Wahabbist terrorist--not Christianity and not Judaism. Only Islam is the source of violence between Muslim factions within the Middle East--between Sunni and Shia, between Fatah and Hamas--not Western governments, and especially not the United States, a country that has given billions to these Muslim groups only to see it disappear into a bureaucratic oblivion immediately it reaches the so-called "leaders" of these Islamic factions. Likewise, if there exists a provincial culture outside of the Western hemisphere wherein murder and terrorism are become most fashionable, even acceptable, then you can be assured that Islam, the same Islam practiced the world over, contributed markedly to the formation of that culture.

"When the light is crooked, the shadow is crooked." --Yiddish proverb

"Muslim leaders and governments are unhappy to call it Islamic terrorism. They argue Islam is a religion of peace and that Islamic faith is not the cause of terrorism. --K.N. Pandita