Violent Islamists

London

THE THREAT DESCRIBED

Jesus once remarked, "you will know them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:20). The founder of Islam had thousands of people killed for not adopting his religion. Indeed, of the founders of the world's major religions, he is the only one who practiced and advocated violence, leading, it is estimated, 25 battles between AD 623 and 632, when he died. Today the Middle East is dominated by pervasive illiteracy, authoritarianism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, polygamy, and Islam. How did this happen?

THE CALIPHATE OF DESPAIR

In the 7th and 8th centuries violent Islamists invaded what were then the Christian lands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, and converted their peoples with the sword. They conquered Persia. In 711, they invaded Spain, where their rule resulted in burned out convents and monasteries, raped women, crucifixions in Cordoba, and beheadings in Toledo, Barcelona, Seville, and Zamora. Oppressive taxes were laid on those who refused to convert, and daily humiliations.

In 721 violent Islamists invaded France, slaughtering and enslaving before being stopped by Charles Martel leading the French at the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers) in 732. A century later violent Islamists devastated Sicily and coastal and inland towns in Italy, sacking, plundering, and burning, setting fire to churches and libraries, and killing thousands of men, women, and children. Right or wrong, the Christian Crusades were not unprovoked attacks on Islam, but counteroffensives, which failed.

There were Muslims in these centuries who did fine things. Some of them were mathematicians who developed the Hindu numeric system that is the basis of the number system we use today. Some of them designed beautiful gardens. After Aaron, a Christian priest who lived at Alexandria, compiled and translated into Syriac the treatises of the Greek physician Galen, Muslims translated it into Arabic in 685, and it became a major medical source for Avicenna and Averroes. In the 8th century, Muslims translated Aristotle and Plato into Arabic. (Greek philosophy had already been translated into Latin by Boethius, Eastern Christians, and Irish monks in Europe.) And there were, of course, many good Muslim men and women who peacefully raised families.

But since today's violent Islamists persist in nostalgically revisiting the Caliphate, it is well to remember how it was for all those people who were not Muslim, and resisted conversion. It is well to remember what happened to the Jews in Spain in 1066, a supposed "golden age", when they were exiled and slaughtered, and to remember that the Islamic philosophical movement based on free will and reason which had flowered between the 9th and 11th centuries, particularly in Persia, withered in the 12th century. Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes, was banished when he tried to reconcile reason and Islamic thought. His attempt was, admittedly, unreasonable, because he proposed a "dual truth" that allowed what was untrue to reason to be true to religion. By the 14th century, Islamist philosophers had denounced any examination of cause and effect as heretical because it suggested that causes limit the will of Allah.

In opposition to Judaeo-Christian thinking that God loves reason, the Koran (5:64) says that Allah's hand is unfettered - he does not govern the universe according to consistent and observable laws. According to the Islamic occasionalist view, when a sword struck off a person's head, it only merely appeared that the sword was the cause of beheading. The real and primary cause was the will of Allah. The consequence of this thinking is the arrested development of the natural sciences in Islamic societies.

This makes a hash of science and ethics. Moses Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and Albertus Magnus struggled to defeat this view. Aquinas declared that God works through the laws of nature, via causes, so science is a way to understand the divine. As a result, western science began to lay the scientific foundation for the advances we see today.

INVADING EUROPE AND INDIA

Starting in the 13th century and continuing into the 15th century, violent Islamists from the Ottoman Empire invaded Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Albania, North Africa, and Constantinople – all accompanied by the usual infernos, rapes, enslavements of whole populations, and beheadings. Boy children were forcibly taken from their Christian parents, to be turned into slaves and brought up as Muslims who served in the civil service and in the military as Janissaries.

By then violent Islamists had already invaded India in what is regarded as one of the bloodiest periods in human history. Between 800 AD and 1700 AD, they destroyed temples, slaughtered Hindus, and abducted Hindu women and children to slave markets. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by the sword.

In Africa, Islam was spread using the slave-trade as a tool. Theoretically believers could not be enslaved, so entire African tribes converted to Islam in an attempt to escape the depredations of Arab slave traders.

Spain ended the Islamic state in 1492, but for the next three centuries Muslims in North Africa hunted Christians in the Mediterranean and on the coasts of Europe, and sold them as slaves. It is estimated that 1.25 million Christians became slaves, among them the writer Cervantes, who was ransomed after five years in bondage.

In 1456, three years after the fall of Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II invaded Europe, but was thrown back from the walls of Belgrade, "The White City", by Hungarian and Serb defenders. The lifting of the Siege of Belgrade decided the fate of Christendom, that is to say, Europe.

In the 16th century the Ottoman Empire again tried to establish an Islamic state across Europe. In 1529 it invaded Austria. Forced to retreat, its soldiers slaughtered 30,000 farmers. By 1543, it had conquered most of Hungary. In 1565 the Empire besieged Malta, but the Knights of Malta, the Hospitaller Order of St. John, aided by volunteers from Sicily and by desperate women and children, drove them off. In 1571 the Ottoman Empire prepared for a fullscale invasion of Italy. Venice and her Western allies, led by the young, brave Don Juan of Austria, met the Ottoman Navy at the Battle of Lepanto, and defeated it. They were helped by the Christian slaves on the Turkish galleys who used their chains to fight their oppressors.

In 1683 violent Islamists made another attempt to create an Islamic State in Europe by besieging Vienna. Though outnumbered 20 to 1, the exhausted and starving Austrians refused to surrender. The Islamists launched their assault on September 11. (Make of that date what you will. Like 9-11-2001 it may relate to verse 9.111 from the Koran - “God hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs in return is the garden of Paradise: they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth”.) God hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth.) The forces of the Hapsburgs, along with Saxons, Bavarians, Franconians, Swabians, Serbs, and Poles, arrived to help the Viennese as the attack began. On September 12, the Polish King, Jan Sobieski, led the successful cavalry charge that turned the invasion into a rout.

In the 18th century, the Knights of Malta defended Europe from Muslim pirates operating in the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. When Malta fell to Napoleon in 1798, pirates terrorized the western Mediterranean until quelled by the Royal Navy and the Navy and Marine Corps of the young United States. Greece, with the help of the Royal Navy, was the first nation to throw off the yoke of Ottoman tyranny.

In the 19th century Muslims who called themselves Salafis said they were following the earliest and purest Muslim teachings which advocated the violent overthrow of all governments and religious rule. Their 20th and 21st century descendants include the Muslim Brotherhood. Beginning in the late 19th century and ending only in the 1920s, the Ottoman Empire carried out the genocidal slaughter of an estimated one million Christian Armenians. In 1922, violent Islamists massacred 100,000 Greek Christians at Smyrna.

We mention these events because today violent Islamists say they intend to bring back the Caliphate that once stretched from what is now Iraq to Spain. Indeed they plan to turn Britain into a Muslim state and conquer the whole world. Since 1980 they have mounted gruesome attacks on the people of Britain, Indonesia, the Philippines, Denmark, Bali, Spain, East Timor, Australia, Kenya, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Thailand, Iraq, India, France, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya, Holland, Russia, and America.

TEDIOUS TYRANNY

Those of us who look at the fruits of their governments wonder why anyone would want to be ruled by a theocratic tyranny that debases women, humiliates and marginalizes non-Muslims, prevents representative government and free speech, and, as if this were not enough, suffocates innovation, and causes widespread impoverishment. Their idea of a centralized authoritarian state enforcing blanket obedience to an all-encompassing ideology reminds us of fascism. Violent Islamists and their supporters have brought poverty, suffering, and death to many parts of the world, testimony to the misshapen ugliness and fruitlessness of their idea of a totalitarian Islam.

Many believe that Palestinians have been treated unfairly, but this is not the reason that violent Islamists plague the world's peoples today. Violent Islamists have been waging war for 1400 years, and for most of that time they controlled the Middle East and Jerusalem.

Violent Islamists are fueled by an inability to change the corrupt and unjust governments of their own societies, by greed for loot and power, by a sense of failure, envy, and false grievance, and by a warped view of God that impels them to refuse God's gifts of freedom and reason. They also tend to dislike the overt sexual decadence exhibited in many parts of the world. There are people sympathetic to this last point of view, but not to the other notions held by violent Islamists.

Violent, and usually jobless, Islamists have attacked Buddhists in Thailand, Hindus in India, Christians and Jews and secularists wherever they find them, and even other Muslims, slaughtering innocents and drowning justice and mercy in blood. They have beheaded care workers. They have used children and women as human shields. Their code of behaviour is focused on outward compliance and savage punishments for supposed waywardness.

Imprisoned in a fantastical and murderous mindset that misinterprets God, they destroy respect for Islam. They pose a severe and crucial question to men and women around the world.

SHARIA SHAMBLES

We want to create happy families, vibrant arts, justice and prosperity for all, creative innovation, learning, the celebration of peaceful communities and countries, inspiring achievements, and cures for illness, to name but a few. Violent Islamists and their supporters aim to inflict on us their version of Islamic law, sharia.

Sharia allows polygamy, slavery, sexual relations with slaves, amputation for theft, flogging for drinking alcohol, the killing of daughters who want to marry non-Muslims, the murder of gays, being stoned to death for adultery, and being killed for converting to another faith.

There is tremendous variance in the interpretation and implementation of sharia in Muslim societies today, but judging by its punishments, sharia is not compatible with life and culture in any free country. It is not compatible with Britain's Common Law or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If Islamists now living in Britain and the other English-speaking countries obtain sharia, those countries are doomed.

IS ISLAM THE PROBLEM?

According to historians, repressive rule, corruption, contempt for work, particularly work with the hands, slavery, education limited to small numbers of people, the oppression of women, and non-productive economies pre-date Islam in the Middle East. Indeed this description has applied to many societies in the history of the world.

Some Muslims introduced the idea that later verses in the Koran "abrogate", that is, cancel out earlier verses. Unfortunately, the earlier verses are tolerant. The later verses advocate the sword, declare that disbelievers should be killed and that women as inferior to men may be beaten if they are disobedient. These beliefs are opposed to the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius and to liberal democracy.

To summarize our response, found in more detail here:

We build our lives on our values and strengths, and give all the people in Britain the belief that they belong to something greater than themselves that we all share.

We remember our story, and pass it on to others.

We defend the British Constitution.

We elect MPs who will protect our Constitution and our country.

Britain leaves the European Union.

Britain secures her borders and implements wise immigration and welfare policies.

Britain regains her ability to defend herself from attack.

We maintain the supremacy of our Common Law and the equality of every person before Common Law. Those espousing jihad are brought to justice.

Not another mosque is built in Britain until Islamic states show reciprocity by allowing members of other religions to worship freely in their countries.

The provision of separate schooling, separate housing, money for mosques and translators, and the wearing of the niqab is prohibited.

Laws forbidding forced marriages and cousin marriages are passed and enforced.

Together we protect the civil liberties and the lives of the British people.

We do not allow diversity to become an excuse for self-segregation.

We do everything in our power to support a free, vibrant, low-tax British economy where everyone who works hard has a chance to make it.

Under Common Law we respect other people's faiths, but respond with the force of the law when they are doing something with their faith that hurts others.

When Christ told us to love our neighbour as ourselves, He assumed we loved ourselves.

Our country is our home. Its size and strength gives us the best chance we have to be safe and free. We cannot be kind or respectful to other people and other countries unless we respect and love ourselves and our own country.

We stand true to the powers that give us and our children life, and bear witness with all our might to the transforming power of love.

Those of us who believe in God strongly affirm that God wants love, not jihad; that God delights in reason and has given us the gift of reason to use; and that God desires only worship that is freely given.

As described in the Old and New Testaments, love gives us the power to treat others fairly and to act with justice, reason, and common sense; to make and keep promises; to endure hardship; to forgive, to speak the truth, and to hope.

To read Our Response to Violent Islamists

When you contribute to this website,
you support the Best of the Brits.

Join the Circle of Friends »