One of my pet peeves is the mainstream media’s annoying habit of blaming all Islamic terrorism on al-Qaeda, as if nobody is a real terrorist if they aren’t in some way affiliated with this group, founded by Osama Bin Laden in the late 1980s. After 9/11, we became aware of a few likeminded organizations, like the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas, and of course the Muslim Brotherhood (the granddaddy of them all), but the news media have been consistently reticent to report the obvious—that these terrorist boys’ clubs are united and motivated by only one thing: Islam—the Religion of Death. For the longest time, in fact, the news media insisted on describing these groups as “insurgents,” “rebels,” “belligerents,” “enemy combatants,” or my personal favorite, “freedom fighters.” When it became impossible to hide the fact that Islam had something to do with their terrorism, it was assumed that these fanatics were a tiny minority who had somehow “twisted their religion” into something it was not; they had “hijacked” Islam, transforming it from a “religion of peace” into something less benign. So they were called Muslim “radicals” or “extremists,” or the slippery description “Islamists.” What they are almost never called in the press is what they actually are: Islamic FUNDAMENTALISTS—people who embrace the fundamentals, the core principles, the basic foundational tenets of Islam. A “fundamentalist” is by definition not a radical or extremist. He is, rather, simply doing what his belief system requires—unhindered by the diluting or polluting influences of tradition or convention. The only way to identify what these things are is to consult their scriptures (as we have done). This is true of any religion or belief system—but especially one whose scriptures are purported to be the very word of God. And there are only two of these in existence: the Bible and the Qur’an. The Bible’s foundational premise can be boiled down to one thing: LOVE, first for God and then for your fellow man. (See Luke 10:25-28.) The Qur’an’s can be stated like this: “FIGHT them until there is no more disbelief, and religion is only for Allah.” (Qur’an 2:193) Both scriptural traditions spend an inordinate amount of time “fleshing out” these opposing directives. Both insist that their God alone is worthy of worship. And both groups are confident in the prospect of their vindication in the end. But their methods and tactics are polar opposites. Christianity respects free will: the choice of whom to serve is the prerogative of the individual. Christianity invites; it teaches; it reasons; it offers salvation from our fallen state through grace—the unmerited favor showered upon us by a holy but loving God who desires to share an intimate relationship with us for eternity. “Let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely.” (Revelation 22:17) Islam, on the other hand, relies on force, compulsion, threats of violence in this world and hell fire in the next, to make people submit to a life of pointless ritual that offers no chance of salvation from one’s sins. Fighting—jihad—is the only way to earn the carnal pleasures of eternal debauchery in paradise in the afterlife (and paradise is defined as a good thing because Allah isn’t there). So whereas Christian fundamentalists LOVE, Islamic fundamentalists FIGHT. If I as a Christian don’t love you, I am rightly labeled a hypocrite—technically, a pretender. But the same distinction applies to Muslims: if they do not fight against you with the goal of either forcing you to submit to Allah and his messenger or killing you for non-compliance, then they are rightly described as hypocrites—and the Qur’an does that very thing. In short, if a “Christian” does not love, he is not really a follower of Christ (see I John 4:7-8.) But if a Muslim does not fight—if he does not participate in jihad against the hated infidels with his life and/or resources—then he is not really a follower of Muhammad, but is destined to the hottest fires of Allah’s hell. But wait. We are incessantly assured (by the same media who insist that Muslim terrorists are “radical extremists”) that these Islamic fundamentalists—those who favor Sharia law, the rule of the Islamic scriptures over any other authority—are a tiny minority, only a few percent of the total Muslim population. This may have been the case a hundred years ago, but it is no longer true. There are currently about 1.6 billion Muslims in this world, and at least forty-six nations in which they comprise the ruling majority. Ben Shapiro reports on the results of a 2009 Pew Research study that set out to determine how many of these Muslims hold “radical” (i.e., fundamentalist) views. The question was, “Is radicalism in the Muslim world a tiny minority phenomenon?” We’re not trying to pin down the number of actual “blood-on-your-hands” terrorists, you understand, but rather how many people there are whose belief system aligns with them. After all, terrorists need financial support to do what they do, and Muhammad declared that one who equips and facilitates jihad is as “good” as the one who actually swings the scimitar. Not all of the countries they polled were ruled by Muslims, and they didn’t offer survey results for every Islamic nation, but their findings are significant nonetheless—and a little surprising. The nations reported on are as follows. Indonesia: 143 million radicalized (i.e., fundamentalist) Muslims (out of a total Muslim population of 205 million). Egypt: 55.2 million radicals (out of 80 million Muslims). Pakistan: 135.4 million radicals (out of 179 million Muslims). Bangladesh: 121.9 million radicals. Nigeria 53.7 million. Iran: 62.1 million. Turkey: 23.9 million. Morocco: 24.6 million. Iraq: 24.3 million. Afghanistan: 24 million. Jordan: 3.8 million. Palestinian-controlled areas: 3.8 million. And in the West? France: 1.6 million radical Muslims. Great Britain: 2.2 million. United States: about 500,000. That totals up to 680,030,000 radical, extremist, fundamentalist (whatever you want to call them) Muslims, out of a total survey population of 942.3 million Muslims, in eleven Muslim-majority nations (out of 46 candidates) plus three nations where they’re in the minority. Let those statistics sink in. 72% of the Muslims who were surveyed—in nations large and small, both moderate and radical in reputation, whether in the majority or the minority—want Sharia law to be imposed worldwide. I think that’s a large enough sample to reasonably extrapolate out the trend over the entire Muslim world—including places that weren’t studied, like Somalia, Libya, Syria, the Sudan, and Algeria. 72% of 1.6 billion total Muslims in the world today comes out to 1,152,000,000 people on earth today who would like to see your butt in the air five times a day in prayer to a false god, and who would, if push came to shove, prefer to see you dead than in your current state of infidelity.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 01:29:02 +0000
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