The Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement Blog

Archive for February, 2013

Issue 87 [@1:33:09]: Walid Shoebat – “What the West needs to understand about Islam is that Islam has the potential of replacing the dangers that we just kinda did away with, Nazism and Communism. Like Nazisms and like Communism, [in] Islamism, the end justifies the means. There is no respect for national borders and the whole ideology is to promote their way of thinking and to promote their way of life throughout the entire world. That’s what’s being taught in the Middle East, that’s what’s being coming out of Jurisprudence in Al-Azhar and Saudi Arabia and all throughout the Muslim world is that Islam will conquer and will continue to conquer until it triumphs, until everybody in the world say ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet’.”

Rebuttal 87: With discussions so far it is now too boring to rebut the incessant rants of this documentary which are repetitive.

This documentary has tacitly tried to transpose the repugnant feelings left by Nazism and Communism to Islam. This is distortion of facts and is farthest from reality. Did it ever occur to Shoebat as to why Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Colonialism, Slavery, Inquisition, Holocaust, World Wars or any other evil of a large scale never evolved out of Islam, but only out of Christian lands? By contrast, if and when such serpents raised their heads in the Islamic world, they were sooner or later isolated and quashed by Muslims themselves, whereas the aforementioned evils out of the West were aided and abetted by West itself. The reason is simply that Islam leaves no capacity for such evils to even emerge. Can Christianity make such a claim?

The current Issue touches upon four main areas to malign Islam, namely Nazism, Communism, the means employed by Islam to achieve its goals and the inevitable spread of Islam. Each of these will be addressed below.

Nazism

Shoebat is one of the faces of the lies of this documentary which has not left a stone unturned to associate anything and everything evil that West has experienced in its own history and of its own making to Islam. Nazism is one such ideology. Shoebat needs to be educated about origins of Nazism for which one has to look no farther than an apparently innocuous news article in Jerusalem Post [September 29, 2010]:

‘Germany makes final payment for WWI reparations’ – Final $94 million payment coincides with 20th anniversary of German reunification, according to ‘Der Spiegel’ report.

While celebrating the 20th anniversary of German unification on Sunday, the country will make its final payment for reparations as outlined in the Treaty of Versailles that concluded World War I, Der Spiegel reported.

The payment will be the final installment of interest on foreign bonds Germany issued in the inter-war period to raise necessary funds to pay reparations to the Allies following its defeat 92 years ago.

….

The huge debt forced upon Germany after its World War I defeat has often been pointed to as a contributing factor to the rise of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi party, and the eventual breakout of World War II.

German historian Professor Gerd Krumeich spoke with Der Spiegel about the German people’s perception of the post-war debt as an injustice and its role in Hitler’s seizure of power. “The central factor behind Hitler’s seizure of power was his promise ‘I’ll win this war in the end, I will undo this injustice and tear up this treaty and restore Germany to its old greatness.'”

Of note is that Germany under Hitler emerged out of the ashes of the same manufactured and taunted ‘Judeo-Christian’ values that Bet Ye’or advocated for in Issue 85. After the end of World War I (July 1914 – November 11, 1918) a defeated Germany was further humiliated to accept Treaty of Versailles and pay war reparations to the Allies. It is important to understand the immorality of imposing such extreme penalties on peoples because the generation that is responsible for a war is usually ousted after the war and such penalties are inflicted as mass punishment for the future generations that had no say in the war to begin with. Fact of the matter is that in 2010 the newborns in Germany paid for a war almost a century ago. The scale of penalties imposed on Germany by the Allies was immeasureably high by any standards:

Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles assigned blame for the war to Germany; much of the rest of the Treaty set out the reparations that Germany would pay to the Allies.

The total sum of war reparations demanded from Germany—around 226 billion Marks (ℳ)—was decided by an Inter-Allied Reparations Commission. In 1921, it was reduced to ℳ 132 billion, at that time, $31.4 billion (US $442 billion in 2013), or £6.6 billion (UK £284 billion in 2013).

It could be seen that the Versailles reparation impositions were partly a reply to the reparations placed upon France by Germany through the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt signed after the Franco-Prussian War; critics of the Treaty argued that France had been able to pay the reparations (5 billion francs) within three years while the Young Plan of 1929 estimated that German reparations would be paid for a further 59 years, until 1988. Indemnities of the Treaty of Frankfurt were in turn calculated, on the basis of population, as the precise equivalent of the indemnities imposed by Napoleon I on Prussia in 1807.

The Versailles Reparations came in a variety of forms, including coal, steel, intellectual property (e.g. the trademark for Aspirin) and agricultural products, in no small part because currency reparations of that order of magnitude would lead to hyperinflation, as actually occurred in post-war Germany, thus decreasing the benefits to France and Britain.

Reparations due in the form of coal played a big part in punishing Germany. The Treaty of Versailles declared that Germany was responsible for the destruction of coal mines in Northern France, parts of Belgium, and parts of Italy. Therefore, France was awarded full possession of Germany′s coal-bearing Saar basin for a period. Also, Germany was forced to provide France, Belgium, and Italy with millions of tons of coal for 10 years. However, under the control of Adolf Hitler, Germany stopped outstanding deliveries of coal within a few years, thus violating the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Germany finally finished paying its reparations in 2010. [Wikipedia]

The aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles for its plunder of Germany was:

In Germany, there was a socialist revolution which led to the brief establishment of a number of communist political systems in (mainly urban) parts of the country, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the creation of the Weimar Republic.

On 28 June 1919, Germany, which was not allowed representation, was not present to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The one sided treaty by the victors placed blame for the entire war upon Germany (a view never accepted by German nationalists but argued by, inter alia, German historian Fritz Fischer). Germany was forced to pay 132 billion marks ($31.5 billion, 6.6 billion pounds) in reparations (a very large amount for its day which was finally paid off in October 2010). It was followed by inflation in the Weimar Republic, a period of hyperinflation in Germany between 1921 and 1923. In this period the worth of fiat Papiermarks with respect to the earlier commodity Goldmarks was reduced to one trillionth (one million millionth) of its value. On December 1922 the Reparations Commission declared Germany in default, and on 11 January 1923 French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr until 1925.

The treaty required Germany to permanently reduce the size of its army to 100,000 men, renounce tanks and have no air force (her capital ships, moored in Scapa Flow, were scuttled by their crews).

Germany saw relatively small amounts of territory transferred to Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium, a larger amount to France and the greatest portion as part of re-established Poland. Germany’s overseas colonies were divided amongst a number of Allied countries. It was the loss of territory that now constituted part of Poland that caused by far the greatest resentment. Nazi propaganda would feed on a general German view that the treaty was unfair—many Germans never accepted the treaty as legitimate, and later gave their political support to Adolf Hitler, who was arguably the first national politician to both speak out and take action against the treaty’s conditions. [Wikipedia]

To put it simply, the hyperinflation faced by Germany as a consequence of Treaty of Versailles was of an unimaginable scale:

Germany went through its worst inflation in 1923. In 1922, the highest denomination was 50,000 Mark. By 1923, the highest denomination was 100,000,000,000,000 Mark. In December 1923 the exchange rate was 4,200,000,000,000 Marks to 1 US dollar. In 1923, the rate of inflation hit 3.25 × 106 percent per month (prices double every two days). Beginning on 20 November 1923, 1,000,000,000,000 old Marks were exchanged for 1 Rentenmark so that 4.2 Rentenmarks were worth 1 US dollar, exactly the same rate the Mark had in 1914.

Peak Month and Rate of Inflation: Jan. 1920, 56.9%
Peak Month and Rate of Inflation: Nov. 1923, 29,525% [Wikipedia]

The anti-Semitic evil of Nazism was fostered foremost by the leading industrialist icon of the West, none other than Henry Ford, the richest man of his time who wrote the book ‘The International Jew‘ [pdf download]. The influence of Ford on Hitler is outlined in the online article ‘Henry Ford: American anti-Semitism and the class struggle, by Nancy Russell, 8 April 2003‘ which is excerpted below:

Ford’s impact on Hitler was evidenced by a framed photograph of the industrialist that hung on Hitler’s office wall. Tens of thousands of copies of Ford’s anti-Semitic tracts were circulated in Germany in 1921-22, just as Hitler was gaining control of the Nazi Party. Mein Kampf contains sections that appear to be lifted from the Dearborn Independent.

Hitler refers to the industrialist, the only American mentioned in his biography, stating, “Every year makes them [the Jews] more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of 120 million; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury still maintains full independence.”

Ford was delighted, on his seventy-fifth birthday, to receive a special honor from Hitler, the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle. The honor was bestowed on Ford on July 30, 1938—four months after the Anschluss and the mass terror against Viennese Jews—at a birthday dinner attended by more than 1,500 prominent Detroiters. This was the highest honor of the Reich that could be bestowed on a foreign national, and the German consul traveled to Detroit to personally drape the golden cross with swastikas over Ford’s chest.

Shoebat’s ‘enlightened’ West not only sowed the nationalistic pride in a defeated and punished German nation, it also provided her the inspiration for its future atrocities. Before Shoebat forgets, he needs to be reminded that it was across the board Christians within Germany as well who elected Hitler to power in the first place as noted in the article ‘Who Voted for the Nazis?, by Dick Geary, History Today, Volume: 48 Issue: 10 1998‘ [full article at this link], which is excerpted below:

Between 1928 and 1932, the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) became the most popular of Germany’s many political organisations. It had won no more than 2.6 per cent of votes cast in the Reichstag election of 1928 but just two years later registered massive gains, winning 18.3 per cent of the popular vote. The Reichstag election of July 1932 saw even more spectacular success: 13.7 million German electors, some 37.3 per cent of all votes cast, opted for the NSDAP, making it the largest party in the Reich.

This story of electoral success certainly forms the background to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. However, even at the peak of the NSDAP’s popularity before this moment, almost 63 per cent of the German electorate did not vote for the Nazis. What is more, in November 1932, the Nazi Party actually lost 2 million votes. This means that Hitler was not directly voted in to power; for in the Weimar system of absolute proportional representation, 37 per cent of the vote in July 1932 gave the Nazis nothing like a majority in the Reichstag.

Although Hitler’s political career began in Munich, in the elections of 1928 to November 1932 the NSDAP won a higher share of the vote in Protestant than in Catholic Germany. In the Catholic Rhineland and Bavaria (apart from Protestant Franconia) it polled disproportionately badly. In fact in July 1932 the Nazi share of the vote was almost twice as high in Protestant as in Catholic areas. The inability, of Nazis to attract the Catholic vote was demonstrated by the stable support for the Catholic Centre Party, which regularly gained between 11.8 and 12.5 per cent between 1928, and November 1932; and by that of its sister confessional party, the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), which stayed firm at around 3 per cent in those same elections.

In some places, of course, the NSDAP mobilised Catholic voters on a significant scale, as happened in Breslau and Liegnitz (towns in Silesia where conflicts between Germans and Poles coloured political identity), in the Catholic rural areas of the Palatinate, and among some Catholics in the Black Forest; but these cases were atypical.

What this documentary and even the rest of the world might not know that the first voice raised against Hitler’s persecution of Jews was raised by Muslims:

“The West may rightly be described as a continent of “isms”. Capitalism, Socialism, Bolshevism, Facism, Communism — these are the so many manifestations of a restless soul seeking after some true solution of a social system. On top of them all now comes in Germany what may be called Hitlerism. Whether this new tide will take the German people back to the promised land flowing with milk and honey is yet to be seen. In the meantime it has launched a bitter campaign of hatred against the Jews who, as reports show, are subjected to severe persecutions all over Germany. This is deplorable, to say the least and no movement based on hatred can be expected to blow any good to humanity. Europe in quest of a social order has tried so many isms, each having landed it in deeper social bogs. Will it not give a trial to the one “ism” that sprang from the soil of Arabia and which combines all that is best and is free from all that is evil in all the “isms” it has so far tried, viz., Islamism?” [emphasis added] [‘Hitlerism’, The Light Lahore, April 8 1933, p. 5 (pdf p. 102) – a large size pdf download]

A further discussion on the above topic can be read at this link.

Contrary to Treaty of Versailles another incidence of our times is based upon tradition of Prophet Muhammad. When Nelson Mandela was elected to presidency of South Africa in 1994, he too forgave the atrocious Whites in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad who had forgiven his blood thirsty enemies when he overcame them, only fourteen centuries before (see Issue 51). When we compare the histories of the West and Islam, the contrast is too obvious. In West the defeated enemy is subjected to humiliation of Treaty of Versailles which in turn gives rise to likes of Nazism, Holocaust and World War II. Whereas, in Islamic tradition the subjugated are given freedom by Truth and Reconciliation Commission and after Conquest of Makkah, whence such tradition permanently reforms a society, restores human dignity and promotes model of righteousness and peace for future generations. Alas! These documentary makers are morally blind to dynamics of history.

10:25-27. And Allah invites to the abode of peace [i.e. Islam], and guides whom He pleases to the right path. For those who do good is good (reward) and more (than this). Neither darkness nor disgrace will cover their faces. These are the owners of the Garden; in it they will abide. And those who earn evil, the punishment of an evil is the like of it, and humiliation will cover them — they will have none to protect them from Allah — as if their faces had been covered with slices of the dense darkness of night. These are the companions of the Fire; in it they will abide.

Communism

Shoebat like Trifkovic before revisits the failed ideology of Communism. In Issue 83, which reader may refer to, it was brought to fore that Communism too was a child of the West. Communism kept on expanding despite cold war by the West. Its further expansion was not only halted but on the contrary, the Communism was dismembered once it challenged the Muslim world in Afghanistan, a favor to the West by Islam that this documentary is totally oblivious of.

Goal of Islam

Submission before a living God is at the core of Islam. This one external physical gesture coupled with internal humility of the supplicant is the first step to tame the innate haughty and selfish urges of mankind which if left unchecked impede its individual and collective progress:

22:77. O you who believe! bow down and prostrate yourself, and worship your Lord and do good deeds so that you may attain your goal. [Nooruddin]

It is only after the bowing and prostration that leads to state of submission to God for all His laws, physical and moral, when beast within is mellowed and such a person enters Islam, the abode of peace for self and others:

22:78. And strive your hardest to win the pleasure of Allâh, so hard a striving as is possible and as it behoves you. He has chosen you and has imposed no hardship upon you in the matter of your faith, (so follow) the creed of your father Abraham. He named you Muslims (both) before this and (again) in this (Book the Qur’ân) [i.e. a Muslim by definition is at peace with man and with God], so that the Messenger may be a guardian over you and that you may be guardians [of peace] over people. Therefore, observe Prayer, keep on presenting the Zakât and hold fast to Allâh. He is your Patron, what a gracious Patron, and what a gracious Helper. [Nooruddin]

Means to achieve the goals in Islam:

Islam is an individual choice first before it can have collective impact. Edification and elevation of mankind is at the heart of Islam. To achieve one’s goals in life in any sphere of effort, a Muslim has to conduct oneself with certain ethical standards, the sampler of which is taken from the website aaiil.us and is reproduced below:

Truthfulness:

“O you who believe! keep your duty to Allah and speak straight, true words.” (Holy Quran 33:70)

“O you who believe, keep your duty to Allah, and be with the truthful people.” (9:119)

“Be maintainers of justice and bearers of true witness for Allah, even if it (the truth) goes against your own selves or parents or relatives or someone who is rich or poor.” (4:135)

Sincerity:
“Serve Allah, being sincere to Him in obedience.” (39:2)

“It is most hateful in the sight of Allah that you say things which you do not do.” (61:3)

“Woe to those who pray but are unmindful of their prayers, who do good to be seen.” (107:4-6)

Unselfishness:

“You cannot attain to righteousness unless you spend (in charity) out of those things which you love.” (3:91)

“They (the true believers) give food, out of love for Allah, to the poor, the orphan and the slave, saying: We feed you only for Allah’s pleasure – we desire from you neither reward nor thanks.” (76:8-9)

“Do no favour seeking gain.” (74:6)

Humility:

“The servants of the Beneficent (Allah) are those who walk on the earth in humility.” (25:63)

“Do not turn your face away from people in contempt, nor go about in the land exultingly.” (31:18)

“Do not ascribe purity to yourselves. Allah knows best who is righteous.” (53:32)

Patience:

“Allah loves those who are patient.” (3:145)

“Give good news to the patient, who, when a misfortune befalls them, say: We are Allah’s and to Him do we return.” (2:155-156)

Forgiveness:

“Pardon (people) and overlook (their faults). Don’t you love that Allah should forgive you.” (24:22)

“(The dutiful are) . . . those who restrain their anger and pardon people. Allah loves those who do good to others.” (3:134)
“Whenever they (true believers) are angry they forgive.” (42:37)

“The recompense of evil is punishment like it. But whoever forgives (an evil committed against himself) and amends (matters), his reward is with Allah. . . . Whoever is patient and forgives, that is a matter of great resolution.” (42:40, 43)

When the Holy Prophet Muhammad defeated his enemies in Makka and returned to that city as its conqueror, he forgave them in the following words:

“No reproof be against you this day; Allah may forgive you, and He is the most Merciful of those who show mercy.” (12:92)

Purity and cleanliness:

“He indeed is successful who purifies himself (in mind and body), and remembers the name of his Lord, then prays.” (87:14-15)

“Purify your garments and shun uncleanness.” (74:4-5)

Honesty:

“Don’t go near the property of an orphan, except in a goodly way, till he attains maturity. And fulfil the promise (you make) . . .. Give full measure when you measure out, and weigh with a true balance.” (17:34-35)

“Do not swallow up your property among yourselves by false means, nor offer it as a bribe to the officials so that you may swallow up other people’s property unlawfully while you know.” (2:188)

Goodness and kindness to others:

“Allah commands you to uphold justice and to do good to others and to give to the relatives.” (16:90)

Three degrees of doing good are mentioned here: “justice,” which means returning any good that someone has done you with equal good; “do good to others,” which means taking the initiative in doing good to others; and “give to the relatives,” which means doing good to people instinctively and naturally just as one does good to one’s close relatives.

“Do good to others, surely Allah loves those who do good to others.” (2:195)

Consideration and respect for others:

“O you who believe! do not enter houses other than your own until you have asked permission and greeted the inmates . . . and if it is said to you, ‘Go back’, then go back.” (24:27-28)

“O you who believe! avoid most of suspicion (against others), for surely suspicion in some cases is sin; and do not spy (into other people’s affairs), nor let some of you backbite others.” (49:12)

“When you are greeted with a greeting, greet with one better than it, or return it (in the same terms at least).” (4:86)

Courage:

Speaking of a small number of Muslims facing a big and powerful enemy, the Quran relates:

“Those to whom men said: people have gathered against you, so fear them; but this increased their faith, and they said: Allah is sufficient for us and He is an excellent Guardian.” (3:173)

Moderation:

“Eat and drink, but do not be immoderate.” (7:31)

“Do not chain your hand to your neck (so that you are mean in spending), nor stretch it out to the utmost limit (so that you waste everything).” (17:29)

Regarding the performance of religious duties, the Holy Prophet has given the following advice:

“Religion is easy, but any one who exerts himself too much in religious devotions will get overcome by it; so you should just act rightly, and keep to the mean, and be of good cheer, and ask for Allah’s help morning, evening, and a part of the night.” (Bukhari.)

Cheerfulness:

“Be of good cheer.” (Holy Prophet in Bukhari.)

“It is an act of charity to meet your fellow with a cheerful face.” (Holy Prophet in Mishkat.)

Finally, we give a verse of the Holy Quran mentioning a number of qualities a Muslim, man or woman, should try to acquire:

“The truthful men and the truthful women, the patient men and the patient women, the humble men and the humble women, the charitable men and the charitable women, the fasting men and the fasting women, the men who guard their chastity and the women who guard their chastity, the men who remember Allah much and the women who remember Allah much – for all these Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward.” (33:35)

How does Islam require a Muslim to treat the people around him?

The Holy Quran and the Hadith mention various categories of people that one has to deal with, and give a great deal of guidance on how to behave towards them.

Parents and the elderly:

“Your Lord has commanded that you worship none but Him, and do good to parents. If one or both of them reach old age with you, do not say ‘Fie’ to them, nor chide them, but speak to them a generous word . . . and say, My Lord, have mercy on them as they brought me up when I was little.” (17:23-24).

“The Holy Prophet said, It is one of the greatest sins that a man should curse his parents. Someone said, How can a man curse his own parents? He said, If a man abuses the father of another, that person will abuse his parents (in return).” (Report in Bukhari.)

Other Near Relatives:

“Do good to the near relatives.” (4:36)

“Give to the near relative his due, and also to the needy and to the traveller (in need of help). (17:26).

Children:
“Do not kill your children for fear of poverty – We (Allah) provide for them and for you.” (17:31)

“A man came to the Holy Prophet and said, `You kiss children but we do not kiss them’. The Holy Prophet said, `Do I have any control over you if Allah has taken away mercy from your heart’.” (Report in Bukhari.)

Orphans and destitute children:

“Maintain the orphans out of their property and clothe them and give them a good education. Test them when they reach the age of majority, and if you find them to be mature, hand over their property to them.” (4:5-6)

“I and the man who brings up an orphan will be in paradise like this,” said the Holy Prophet, putting together his forefinger and middle finger. (Report in Bukhari.)

Poor and needy:

“Righteous is he who . . . gives away wealth out of love for Him to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and to those who ask and to set slaves free.” (2:177)

“What will make you understand what the uphill road (to success) is? (It is) to free a slave, or feed at a time of hunger an orphan who is a relative or the poor man lying in the dust.” (90:11-16)

“Have you seen him who goes against religion? That is the one who is rough to the orphan and does not urge the feeding of the needy.” (107:1-3)

“(The true believers are those) in whose wealth there is a known right for the beggar and the destitute.” (70:24-25)

“The person who manages things for the widow and the poor is like the one who strives hard in the way of Allah.” (Holy Prophet in Bukhari.)

Neighbours:

“Be good to . . . the neighbour belonging to your people and the alien neighbour.” (4:36)

“He is not a believer who fills his stomach while his neighbour is hungry.” (Holy Prophet in Hadith.)

“The angel Gabriel continued to enjoin upon me good treatment of the neighbour, so much so that I thought he would make him heir to one’s property.” (Holy Prophet in Bukhari.)

Wives/Husbands:

“They (your wives) are a garment for you, and you are a garment for them.” (2:187)

“Of His (Allah’s) signs is that He created spouses for you from yourselves so that you might find quiet of mind in them, and He put between you love and compassion.” (30:21)

“The best of you are those who are kindest to their wives.” (Holy Prophet in Tirmizi.)

A man related:
“I asked Aishah (Holy Prophet’s wife): What did the Prophet do when in his house? She said, `He served his wife’, meaning that he did work for his wife.” (Report in Bukhari.)

Employers/Employees:

“(The true believers) are those who are keepers of their trusts and covenants.” (23:8)

“Trusts” include the duties and the other things with which an employee is entrusted by his employer; “covenants” include the contract by which both the employer and the employee are bound.

“Allah says: There are three persons whose opponents I shall be on the Day of Judgment . . . (the third is) the person who employs a servant and receives fully the labour due from him, but does not pay his wages.” (Holy Prophet in Bukhari.)

Ans, a companion of the Holy Prophet, related:
“I served the Holy Prophet for ten years, and he never said to me, `fie’, nor did he ever say `Why have you done this’, or `Why have you not done that’.” (Report in Bukhari.)

Animals:

“There is no animal in the earth, nor a bird flying on its two wings, but they are communities like yourselves (O people).” (6:38)

Someone asked the Holy Prophet, “Is there a reward for us (from Allah) for doing good to beasts?” He replied:
“In every animal having a liver fresh with life there is a reward.” (Holy Prophet in Mishkat.)

“Be careful of your duty to Allah in the matter of dumb animals; ride them while they are in a fit condition, and eat them while they are in a fit condition.” (Holy Prophet in Abu Dawud.)

“Whoever tills a field, and birds and beasts eat from it, it is an act of charity.” (Holy Prophet in Musnad of Ahmad.)

Authorities:

Regarding electing and appointing people to positions of authority, the Quran says:
“Allah commands you to make over trusts (or positions of trust and authority) to those worthy of them.” (4:58)

Some other principles are as follows:

“Obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority from among you; then if you quarrel about anything (with your authorities) refer it to Allah and the Messenger” (4:59), i.e. settle the disagreement by means of the Holy Quran and the Holy Prophet’s example.
“Obedience (of authority) is due only in good matters”, i.e., orders to do wrong must not be obeyed. (Holy Prophet in Bukhari.)

The first head of state of the Muslims after the Holy Prophet, the famous Hazrat Abu Bakr, said in a speech after his election:

“Help me if I am in the right. Correct me if I am in the wrong. Obey me as long as I obey Allah and His Messenger; in case I disobey Allah and His Messenger, I have no right to obedience from you.”

“The most excellent jihad is to speak the truth in the face of an unjust ruler.” (Holy Prophet in Mishkat.)

Muslims:

“Hold fast by the covenant of Allah all together and be not disunited. And remember Allah’s favour to you when you were enemies, then He united your hearts, so by His favour you became brethren.” (3:103)

“The believers are brethren, so make peace between your brethren . . . Do not find fault with your own people, nor call one another by (bad) nick­names.” (49:10-12)

“Help one another in good and righteous works, and do not help one another in sin and aggression.” (5:2)

“Do not hate one another and do not be jealous of one another and do not boycott one another, and be servants of Allah, as brothers; and it is not lawful for a Muslim to sever his relations with his brother for more than three days.” (Holy Prophet in Bukhari.)

“You will see the believers in their having mercy for one another, and in their love for one another, and in their kindness towards one another, like the human body: when one limb is ailing, the whole body feels it, one part calling out the other with sleeplessness and fever.” (Holy Prophet in Bukhari.)

“None of you has faith until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” (Holy Prophet in Bukhari.)

Those who abuse Muslims:

“Bear patiently what they (abusers) say.” (20:130)

“Disregard their annoying talk.” (33:48)

“When you hear Allah’s messages disbelieved in and mocked at, sit not with them until they enter into some other talk.” (4:140)

“And if you invite them to guidance, they hear not; and you see them looking towards you, yet they see not. Take to forgiveness and enjoin good and turn away from the ignorant.” (7:198-199)

“The Messenger of Allah and his Companions used to forgive the idolaters and the followers of the book (Jews and Christians), as Allah had commanded them, and they used to show patience on hearing hurtful words.” (Report in Bukhari.)

Enemies:

“Repel evil with what is best, when lo! he between whom and you there is enmity will be like a warm friend.” (41:34)

“Many of the people of the book wish that they could turn you back into disbelievers after you have believed, out of envy from themselves. . .. But pardon and forgive.” (2:109)

“And you will always find treachery in them, except a few of them. So pardon them and forgive. Surely Allah loves those who do good to others.” (5:13)

Non­Muslims:

“Allah does not forbid you concerning those people who do not fight you because of your religion, nor expel you from your homes, that you show them kindness and deal with them justly.. . . Allah forbids you only concerning those people who fight you for your religion, and drive you from your homes and help others to expel you, that you make friends of them.” (60: 8,9)

“Whatever good they (people of other religions) do, they will not be denied it (by Allah), and Allah knows who the righteous are.” (3:115)

“O you who believe, be upright for Allah, bearers of witness with justice; and do not let the hatred of a people incite you not to act with justice. Be just; that is nearer to observance of duty.” (5:8)

“Call (others) to the way of your Lord with wisdom and goodly exhortation, and argue with them in the best manner.” (16:125)

“Argue not with the people of the Book (Jews, Christians, and other people having scriptures) except by the best (means), save those of them who act unjustly. But say: We believe in that which has been revealed to us and revealed to you, and our God and your God is One, and to Him we submit.” (29:46)

A companion of the Holy Prophet relates:
“A funeral procession passed by the Holy Prophet, and he stood up for it. People said to him: It was the funeral of a Jew. He said: Was it not a human life?” (Report in Bukhari.)

Mankind in general:

“Mankind is a single nation.” (2:213)

“O mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into races and families so that you may know each other. The most honoured of you in Allah’s sight are those who best keep their duty.” (49:13)

“We (Allah) have not sent you (O Muhammad) except as a mercy to the nations.” (21:107)

“Speak good words to all people.” (2:83)

“Allah commands you that . . . when you judge between people (i.e., of any race, religion, family, class, etc.), you judge with justice.” (4:58)

The inevitable spread of Islam

If only Shoebat can open his eyes to the above sampled teachings of Islam, which are the means to achieve the goals in Islam, he will be constrained to see Islam as the only doctrine out there which has and will act as a global bulwark against the evils of Nazism, Communism, Fascism, Colonialism, exploitative Capitalism etc. in short all the evils that arose and will arise out of the front lawn of a morally deprived Christianity of the West. One such aspect of failure of Christianity, Judaism and the isms that arose in the West is their focus on Nationalism and the current documentary with its mouth pieces, namely Trifkovic and Bet Ye’or have only advocated it beyond any doubt. The universal historian, Arnold Toynbee commented on Nationalism as a contributing factor to the failure of Christianity and success of Islam. This is what Shoebat fears when he states – “…There is no respect for national borders and the whole ideology is to promote their ways of thinking and to promote their way of life throughout the entire world…”:

ISLAM – THE FUTURE WAVE OF THE WORLD
by Arnold Toynbee
(The Islamic Review, p. 3, March 1961 – pdf download)

A great majority of the human race at the present moment nominally adheres to one or other of four old religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity or Islam. A large part of the minority adheres to other religions of the same age and kind: for instance, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Taoism. But mankind’s real religion today is none of these; it is Nationalism, and this means the collective self-worship of some fraction of the human race. For the time being, at any rate, Nationalism has supplanted the nominal religions in fact, though not avowedly. Only Communism has been able to stand up to Nationalism, and this only in non-Communist countries. In Russia and China, Communism has become Nationalism’s tool. Trotsky wanted to put Russia to work for international Communism, but Trotsky was defeated by Stalin – and the irony of Stalin’s victory was that Stalin was not a Russian by origin. Of course, Georgian Stalin was not the first foreigner to become the leader of a national movement. Corsican Napoleon anticipated him in France, and Austrian Hitler followed him in Germany.

Spectacle in Africa

If we want to see the long-drawn-out history of religion replayed at high speed, we can watch this spectacle in Africa. “Something new is always coming out of Africa,” said the Romans, but it is as true today as it was 1,800 years ago. A single century has seen religion in Africa pass through a succession of phases: from magic and nature-worship to Islam and Christianity from these to Nationalism; and, through back towards the pre-Islamic and pre-Christian dispensation.

Antidotes of Nationalism

Nationalism in Africa is determined to be “modern. But modern nationalism cherishes a nation’s national heritage from the past. The more peculiar the heritage the better. So long as this national heritage is distinctive it is to be treasured, whether intrinsically good or bad. Nationalist Africa seems inclined to treasure its pre-Christian and pre-Islamic past. It is not easy to make a national religion of Christianity or Islam. The appeal of these two missionary religions is not local but universal They address themselves to each individual human being that is born into the world. The objective of each of them is to convert the entire human race, and to make a reality of the brotherhood of man. Neither religion has achieved their identical ideal. Their destiny looks as it would be co-existence. But both their universalism and their individualism are genuine, and this puts them at loggerheads with Nationalism, since Nationalism is some particular fraction of the human race.

Wave of the future

For this reason, Nationalism in Africa tends to look back behind those two world religions to a specifically African past of its own. But which of the competing religions is “the wave of the future? ” It is possible that neither Nationalism nor a resuscitated African magic and nature-worship will prove satisfying to human hearts and minds These have the same spiritual needs in Africa as elsewhere. The weakness of Islam and Christianity is one that they share with the other “higher religions “. In their long journey through time and space they have picked up a mass of accessories that are not only irrelevant but are, in some cases, contradictory to their original messages. This is one of the reasons why they have been losing their hold in recent times. On the other hand they have a strong point that is lacking in all the post-Christian ideologies — Nationalism, Communism and the rest. The historic higher religions have help and comfort to give to the individual on his way through this life. The way is hard, so the help is precious and people who have once had it will not find it easy to do without it. They may be put off by the outer shell that each of the higher religions has acquired; but probably they will still yearn for the spiritual reality within. And, if they can break through the letter and recover the spirit they may yet return to the old religions in some new form.

Respective prospects

If the higher religions do, in truth, have something in them that meets the human soul’s permanent spiritual needs, then their expectation of life will be longer than that of either the current ideologies or the primitive forms of religion and magic. In fact, we may expect to see the historic higher religions revive, and revive inwardly intact, however great may be the changes in their outer appearance. If Islam and Christianity were to revive in Africa, what would be their respective prospects.

One may perhaps guess that in Africa the winning religion will be one that has the spiritual power to over-come the divisions between nations and races and in this point Islam has an advantage which it has already profited. The sense of fraternity is strong enough in Islam to make Muslims of different races willing to inter-marry; and inter-marriage is the touchstone of genuine brotherhood. When Asian or North African Muslim missionaries convert Africans in the great region south of the Sahara, what emerges is a single Muslim community. When Western Christian missionaries convert Africans, what emerges is, all too often, a couple of separate communities, each Christian, but one white and the other black.

This is, unfortunately, the rule in Christendom, and the one outstanding exception to it proves its validity. The Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking Christian peoples seem to be as free from race-feeling as the Muslims are. In Mexico and in Brazil there are many races but a single nation, and it is probably no accident that the Spanish and Portuguese Christians should display this Muslim virtue. It looks as if it were a heritage from their Muslim past. Spain and Portugal were under Muslim rule for many centuries.

So long as this virtue is the monopoly of Islam in the greater part of Tropical Africa, Islam is going to increase there and Christianity is going to decrease. The moral for Christianity is that it should reform its practice to bring this into accord with its principles. For, in principle, Christianity, no less than Islam, is a religion for all mankind – a religion that makes no distinction either of persons or of races.

The future lies with whatever religion or religions can create the spiritual brotherhood that is mankind’s need today. Communism claims to be a sovereign unifier; Islam has been proving itself to be a unifier in Africa; Christianity could play the same role if it could bring itself to live up to its principles. Nationalism, however, stands for division, not for unity, so nationalism really has no future. It may destroy mankind and bury itself in the ruins, but it can do no more than that.

In the Atomic Age we have to choose between two extremes. If we are not to destroy ourselves we have to learn to live as a single united human family embracing all mankind without exception. In Africa we can see man-kind in epitome. Of all the continents Africa may be the first that will give us a clue to our destiny.

Shoebat has a habit of flinging allegation without any substantive proofs. He is only repeating his rant about Al-Azhar for which reader is directed to Issue 30.

References:

Note: [text enclosed in square brackets above is not part of the original quoted sources]

‘Germany makes final payment for WWI reparations’ – The Jerusalem Post
Treaty of Versailles – Wikipedia
Aftermath of World War 1 – Wikipedia
Hyperinflation – Wikipedia
‘The International Jew‘ [pdf download] – Henry Ford
‘Henry Ford: American anti-Semitism and the class struggle, by Nancy Russell, 8 April 2003‘ – World Socialist Web Site
‘Who Voted for the Nazis?’ by Dick Geary, History Today, Volume: 48 Issue: 10 1998 [full article at this link]
‘Hitlerism’, The Light Lahore, April 8 1933, p. 5 (pdf p. 102) – a large size pdf download
A challenge to Western Critics of Islam – Zahid Aziz
Muslim Code of Behavior – aaiil.us
ISLAM – THE FUTURE WAVE OF THE WORLD (pdf download), by Arnold Toynbee
Holy Quran – Nooruddin
Holy Quran – Muhammad Ali, edited by Zahid Aziz [unless stated otherwise, all verses quoted above are from this translation]

Submitted by Abid Aziz.

An American researcher called Suzanne Olsson who has done research and written a book about life of Hazrat Issa as in Kashmir wrote following on her facebook page.

“Can some Ahmaddis please help me answer some questions? I have been asked questions about the Roza Bal tomb by Wikipedia editors. If we can provide the answers, the page about Roza Bal “may” be improved. I have been fighting hard for this! If anyone here can help, these are the questions raised…you can post answers here or send me messages. Whatever works for you best. Thank You.

“Suzanne, welcome back. Regarding edits can you please give a page reference for where James Tabor says Jesus in India is a real possibility? (My answer is the Paul David’s film, and Elaine Pagels mentions this theory of Jesus in India as well. I’ll get the place in the films and post them. There are quite a few, but if you know of additional religious scholars who support the theory, please include them)

This would be question (5) after:
(1) When was the shrine built?
(2) When was the shrine first mentioned?
(3) On what page of the Urdu translation or Persian original of [[Khwaja Muhammad Azam Didamari]] (d.1765) is Youza Asouph mentioned?
(4) What is the source for “Syed Nasir-u-Din (buried 1451)”

Can someone from our Jama`at help her in answering these questions.

As Islam Grows, U.S. Imams In Short Supply
by John Burnett

NPR – February 10, 2013

Islam in America is growing exponentially. From 2000 to 2010, the number of mosques in the United States jumped 74 percent.

Today, there are more than 2,100 American mosques but they have a challenge: There aren’t enough imams, or spiritual leaders, to go around.

The Mid-Cities Mosque in Colleyville, Texas, has two modest minarets that distinguish it as a sacred building here in this sedate suburb between Fort Worth and Dallas. It’s trimmed in green lights — the color of Islam. A Dallas Muslim Yellow Pages sits in a rack outside the doors.

Inside, maghrib prayers, after sunset, are commencing. A husky young imam dressed in a sand-colored tunic closes his eyes and leans into a microphone. A dozen men stand barefoot, elbow-to-elbow on a green carpet, in quietude.

The 200 mostly Pakistani-American members of this small Texas mosque are lucky to have a full-time, American-born imam. There’s an acute imam shortage in America, the result of supply, and demand, says Nouman Ali Khan.

“I’ve had the opportunity to travel to maybe 150 mosques across the country. And the vast majority of them, actually, did not have a full-time imam,” says Ali Khan, who heads Bayyinah, an Arabic-language institute in Dallas that educates future imams. “The ones that did are very happy to have them and the ones that didn’t are constantly asking me when I go for a seminar, ‘Hey, so you know anybody?'”

Separated geographically from the rest of Islam, he says American Muslims must find their own way, must invent their own traditions.

In Islamic countries, mosques and imams are supported by the state. Here in the U.S., they are private just like any church. Moreover, they are likely to serve as religious and community centers for their ethnically distinct congregation.

Indeed, American mosques are filled with Muslims from many different countries. And increasingly they’re the spiritual home of native-born Muslims whose identities are completely American.

Some young Muslims feel alienated from the mosque and from religious culture altogether. So U.S. mosques not only need imams trained in classical Islam, but who possess good English skills and a thorough understanding of American culture.

“You may have a scholarly religious figure that can speak to the older congregation, but he’s not able to connect as well with the youth,” Ali Khan says. “And in a lot of the interviews, it’s even sort of a primary concern how well can you connect with the young in our community.”

The Islamic Association of Mid-Cities went without an imam for 15 months before it finally chose Yahya Jaekoma. He’s a cherubic, 23-year-old of Thai and Afghan descent, who was born in San Diego.

“I was a sponsored skater at the age of 10 … and after breaking my arm, my grandmother told me I [had] to put it off,” Jaekoma explains. “So she sent me to a madrassa, which is an institute to study the Quran, at the age of 14.”

By the time he was 18, Jaekoma had memorized the entire Quran and dedicated his life to religious study. But his time as a hip-hop skateboarder gives him a unique voice for the youth in his mosque.

“I tell them my life story,” he says. “I tell them where I came from. I tell them what I’ve done.”

The youth group at the Mid-Cities mosque includes Sijil Patel, a 16-year-old Pakistani-American who is thoroughly modern with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, crazy-colored sneakers, and a headscarf.

“By having someone that was born here, it’s easier to relate to them, and it’s easier for them to understand our view on what we’re dealing with and, like, the difficulties we have with our faith in, like, such a modern environment,” Patel says.

Some of those things include dating, sex, drugs, alcohol and profanity.

“We’ve been strictly taught in Islam that vulgar language is not allowed,” Patel says. “I try my best to, like, not engage in that type of thing, and I’ve told my friends, too.”

A recent survey by the Islamic Society of North America reports that only 44 percent of American imams are salaried and full-time. The rest are volunteer religious leaders. Four out of five imams here were born and educated outside the United States, mostly in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and India.

“I can count the number of institutions that prepare imams in the U.S. on three fingers,” says Jihad Turk, president the Bayan Claremont Islamic graduate school in Southern California.

Turk estimates that his institution, Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, and Zaytuna College in the San Francisco Bay Area will, collectively, graduate fewer than 30 Koranic scholars this year.

This handful of newly minted American imams should have no trouble at all finding work. [Copyright 2013 NPR]

Issue 86 [@ 1:32:09]: Serge Trifkovic – “In order to defend itself against the onslaught of global Jihad which is coming in the century ahead, I have no doubt of that, the West would need to redefine itself and to say what exactly is the geographic and cultural space to be defended and in the name of what? Defending it in the name of a tepid lukewarm ideology of multiculturalism is impossible. Multiculturalism and postmodern liberalism are not worthy dying for, they are not something that can inspire people to do what their ancestors had done at Poitiers and walls of Vienna in 1683. What global Jihad has in its sight is simple minded commitment of millions of peoples to not only spread a faith but also better themselves at the expense of the infidel in the first instance through immigration and later on if necessary by other means.”

Rebuttal 86: Trifkovic, while taking the baton of this hate relay from Spencer tries to drive home the peg of their invention of a ‘global Jihad’ in the mind of the audience. Their manufactured term ‘global Jihad’ was refuted in the Issue 84 before.

If the audiences pay close attention to the documentary they will eerily note that its arguments of a manufactured fear and hate are pages borrowed from Nazism, with the difference that before it was the Jews for Nazis, now Muslims for this documentary and its experts (see Rebuttal 77).

In his rancor Trifkovic feels threatened by non-Caucasians, so was Hitler by the Jews. The difference is that the latter just did not lament like the former – “Defending it in the name of a tepid lukewarm ideology of multiculturalism is impossible” and instead actually tried the ‘Final Solution‘ which Trifkovic can only dream of against Muslims.

Trifkovic further laments – “Multiculturalism and postmodern liberalism are not worthy dying for, they are not something that can inspire people to do what their ancestors had done at Poitiers and walls of Vienna in 1683”, while he forgets European experiment of Holocaust when his co-thinkers then went all out against the Jewish monetary control:

Prior to the beginning of World War II, during a speech given on January 30, 1939 (the sixth anniversary of his accession to power), Hitler foretold the coming Holocaust of European Jewry when he said: “Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” [Wikipedia]

Trifkovic in his hostility visibly sounds xenophobic and paranoid as if he is a spooky reincarnation reminiscent of Hitler himself. He and his cronies of the documentary want to undo what West achieved in human liberties and freedoms after centuries of trials and tribulations and is still struggling to find its soul.

The racist views of Trifkovic and this documentary can be found in its own disparaging usage of the word ‘Multiculturalism’, whereas it stands for:

While multiculturalism has been used as an umbrella term to characterize the moral and political claims of a wide range of disadvantaged groups, including African Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and the disabled, most theorists of multiculturalism tend to focus their arguments on immigrants who are ethnic and religious minorities (e.g. Latinos in the U.S., Muslims in Western Europe), minority nations (e.g. Catalans, Basque, Welsh, Québécois), and indigenous peoples (e.g. Native peoples in North America, Maori in New Zealand). [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Clearly Trifkovic’s xenophobic view about Multiculturalism can be summarized as follows:

The greatest challenge to multiculturalism may not be philosophical but political. At the start of the twenty-first century, there is talk of a retreat from multiculturalism as a normative ideal and as a set of policies in the West. There is little retreat from recognizing the rights of minority nations and indigenous peoples; the retreat is restricted to immigrant multiculturalism. Part of the backlash against immigrant multiculturalism is based on fear and anxiety about foreign “others” and nostalgia for an imagined past when everyone shared thick bonds of identity and solidarity. Nativism is as old as migration itself, but societies are especially vulnerable to it when economic conditions are especially bad or security is seen to be threatened. In the U.S. the cultural “others” are Latino immigrants, especially unauthorized migrants. Since September 11, Muslim minorities have also come under new scrutiny in the U.S., and concerns over security and terrorism have been invoked to justify tougher border control. The number of Muslim immigrants in North America remains relatively small in comparison to Western Europe, where Muslims have become central to scholarly and popular debates about multiculturalism. The concern is not only over security but also the failures of multiculturalism policies to integrate and offer real economic opportunities to foreigners and their descendants. [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Trifkovic laments that the human thought, social structure and the cultural values in the West are spread on a spectrum between Multiculturalism and Postmodern Liberalism, which in his view are too tolerant and too weak to confront his delusion of a ‘global Jihad’ and that the West is too liberal to answer his call to arms. Without defending Modernism, it is not too surprising that what Trifkovic laments about is the same which Stalin and Hitler opposed, at least in the artistic expression:

After the rise of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Communist government rejected modernism on the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously endorsed futurism and constructivism. The Nazi government of Germany deemed modernism narcissistic and nonsensical, as well as “Jewish” and “Negro”. The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled Degenerate Art. Accusations of “formalism” could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason many modernists of the post-war generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the “canary in the coal mine”, whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened. Louis A. Sass compared madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence. [Wikipedia]

At least, Postmodernism that Trifkovic brings up is a an ism confused in itself:

Postmodernism – A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one’s own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.

Postmodernism is “post” because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody – a characterisitic of the so-called “modern” mind. The paradox of the postmodern position is that, in placing all principles under the scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that even its own principles are not beyond questioning. As the philospher Richard Tarnas states, postmodernism “cannot on its own principles ultimately justify itself any more than can the various metaphysical overviews against which the postmodern mind has defined itself.” [PBS.org]

Has Trifkovic ever paused to think as to who preached these and other isms in the West? They evolved naturally in the West when it rid itself of the shackles of its historically inhumane religious, social and governmental structure of the West itself, as found in the definition of ‘Liberalism‘ in Merriam Webster dictionary:

– a movement in modern Protestantism emphasizing intellectual liberty and the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity
– a theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint and usually based on free competition, the self-regulating market, and the gold standard
– a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties; specifically : such a philosophy that considers government as a crucial instrument for amelioration of social inequities (as those involving race, gender, or class)

Incidentally, Trifkovic picked only two of the isms, the Multiculturalism and Postmodern Liberalism, whereas West has, and is still grappling with hundreds of isms to understand the role, limits, purpose and differentiators of a human in a society (see this list of 234 isms – link). Ironically, the ‘West’ has still not discovered ‘the ism‘ that will provide it with a lasting model. The ever evading ism of the West is factually the ‘Islam – What the West Needs to Know’, not of this documentary but the Islam which is ingrained in human goodness, which is essentially a brief ism, sample of which was delivered as a farewell address by an ‘unlettered’ man about 14 centuries ago:

“Ye people! Hearken unto my words, for I know not whether in another year it will be vouchsafed to me to find myself amongst you in this place.”

“Your lives and properties are sacred and inviolable amongst one another, as this day and this month are sacred to all, until ye appear before your Lord. And (remember) ye shall indeed appear before your Lord, who shall demand from each of you an account of his actions.”

“Ye people ! Ye have rights over your wives and your wives have rights over you. Treat your wives with kindness and love; verily, ye are responsible for them to Allah.”

“Usury is forbidden. The debtor will return the principal, and a beginning will be made with the loans of my uncle Abbas, son of Abdul Muttalib.”

“The aristocracy of old time is trampled under my feet. The Arab has no superiority over him that is not an Arab, and he that is not Arab has no superiority over the Arab. All are children of Adam, and Adam was made of earth.”

“Ye people! Hearken to my words and understand them. Know that all Muslims are brothers, one of another. Ye are one brotherhood. Nothing which belongs to another can be lawfully possessed by any, unless freely given out of good will. Guard yourselves against committing injustice.”

“And your war-captives! See that ye feed them with such food as ye yourselves eat ; and clothe them with the stuff that ye yourselves wear; and if they commit a fault which ye are not minded to forgive, then part with them, for they are the servants of the Lord and are not to be harshly treated.”

“I am leaving to you two noble things; so long as ye cling to them ye shall not go astray: the Book of Allah and the Tradition of His Prophet.”

“Let him that is present tell it unto him that is absent : for it may be that he who shall be told may remember better than he who hath heard it here.”

“O ye that are assembled here! have I delivered my message and fulfilled my word ?” The assembled congregation cried out with one voice: “Yea, verily thou hast.” A sudden glow flashed upon the face of the Prophet, and with eyes filled with grateful tears he raised his trembling hands towards heaven and said thrice : “O Lord! I beseech Thee, bear Thou witness unto it.” [Farewell Pilgrimage of the Holy Prophet Muhammad]

The Battle of Poitiers that Trifkovic alludes to is the same as Battle of Tours fought in October 732 between the Frankish and Burgundian forces under Austrasian Mayor of the Palace Charles Martel, against an army of the Umayyad Caliphate led by ‘Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, Governor-General of al-Andalus. Calling this battle as turning point of Muslim advance is claiming glory in hind sight where there was factually none, but a raid by Spanish Muslims into France that was repulsed. France and its adjoining Gaul, England, Spain, Portugal were play grounds of intrigues, raids, conquests and defeats by fiefdoms throughout history and as recently as World War II. So was the Battle of Tours which was just another blip in the same history. See this link for ‘List of wars involving France’ which runs into hundreds, if not thousands. Trifkovic in the documentary has repeatedly tried to claim this battle as high water mark for Muslim tide into Europe, which is rebutted by modern historians. These counter views are outlined in Wikipedia and reproduced below:

Alessandro Barbero writes, “Today, historians tend to play down the significance of the battle of Poitiers, pointing out that the purpose of the Arab force defeated by Charles Martel was not to conquer the Frankish kingdom, but simply to pillage the wealthy monastery of St-Martin of Tours”.

Similarly, Tomaž Mastnak writes: “ Modern historians have constructed a myth presenting this victory as having saved Christian Europe from the Muslims. Edward Gibbon, for example, called Charles Martel the savior of Christendom and the battle near Poitiers an encounter that changed the history of the world… This myth has survived well into our own times… Contemporaries of the battle, however, did not overstate its significance. The continuators of Fredegar’s chronicle, who probably wrote in the mid-eighth century, pictured the battle as just one of many military encounters between Christians and Saracens – moreover, as only one in a series of wars fought by Frankish princes for booty and territory… One of Fredegar’s continuators presented the battle of Poitiers as what it really was: an episode in the struggle between Christian princes as the Carolingians strove to bring Aquitaine under their rule.”

The Christian Lebanese-American historian Philip Hitti believes that “In reality nothing was decided on the battlefield of Tours. The Moslem wave, already a thousand miles from its starting point in Gibraltar — to say nothing about its base in al-Qayrawan — had already spent itself and reached a natural limit.”

The view that the battle has no great significance is perhaps best summarized by Franco Cardini (it) says in Europe and Islam – “Although prudence needs to be exercised in minimizing or ‘demythologizing’ the significance of the event, it is no longer thought by anyone to have been crucial. The ‘myth’ of that particular military engagement survives today as a media cliché, than which nothing is harder to eradicate. It is well known how the propaganda put about by the Franks and the papacy glorified the victory that took place on the road between Tours and Poitiers…”

In their introduction to The Reader’s Companion to Military History Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker summarise this side of the modern view of the Battle of Tours by saying “The study of military history has undergone drastic changes in recent years. The old drums-and-bugles approach will no longer do. Factors such as economics, logistics, intelligence, and technology receive the attention once accorded solely to battles and campaigns and casualty counts. Words like “strategy” and “operations” have acquired meanings that might not have been recognizable a generation ago. Changing attitudes and new research have altered our views of what once seemed to matter most. For example, several of the battles that Edward Shepherd Creasy listed in his famous 1851 book The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World rate hardly a mention here, and the confrontation between Muslims and Christians at Poitiers-Tours in 732, once considered a watershed event, has been downgraded to a raid in force.”

Trifkovic now and Spencer before also portrayed Vienna in 1683 as another turning point for Islam against Christianity, which is far from the facts on the ground. Ottomans were essentially supporting their allies, the Transylvanians, and both were routed at the hands of Muslim Lipka Tartar cavalry from Poland that came to aid of Viennese. This was addressed in the earlier Issue 51.

References:

‘Final Solution‘ – Wikipedia
Multiculturalism – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Modernism – Wikipedia
Postmodernism – Public Broadcasting Service.org
‘Liberalism‘ – Merriam Webster Dictionary
Philosophical Isms – The Phrontistery
Farewell Pilgrimage of the Holy Prophet Muhammad – by Professor Ebrahim Kahn, p.145-9, Islamic Review, May 1930
List of Wars involving France – Wikipedia
Battle of Tours – Wikipedia

Issue 85 [@ 1:31:10]: Bet Ye’or – Author – Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis: “The question now that we have to ask ourselves is do we want to preserve our Judea-Christian values and our own civilization or do we want, do we choose to go towards a dhimmitude, an enlarged dhimmitude in Europe which will engulf the whole of Europe, maybe not America? But, America will be isolated because it will have to deal in geopolitics with an Islamized dhimmi Europe. And these are problems that have to be taken into consideration by Europeans themselves in choosing their identity and their future, freedom or dhimmitude and by Americans also.”

Rebuttal 85: The term ‘dhimmi’ as distorted by the current documentary has be addressed in issues before – 3, 15d, 16, 40c, 42, 72d, 74.

Bet Ye’or continues with the built up by others before her of a delusional scare in the current segment of the documentary. She manufactures three main anxieties i.e. possibility of loss of Judea-Christian values of the West, if there was such thing to begin with; ‘dimmitude’ of Europe and the subsequent isolation of United States from a ‘dhimmified’ Europe. Each of these is a myth, a delusional paranoia full of fear to create a consequent hate in the Western audience towards both Arabs and Muslims. These myths of Bet Ye’or are addressed below:

The Myth of a Judeo-Christian Tradition
[as quoted on the websites: The Information Clearing House and The Bible Believers]

The following article is from New Dawn Magazine No.23 Feb-March 1994.

This is an age in which news has been superseded by propaganda, and education by brain-washing and indoctrination. From the advertising used to sell poor quality goods, to the classes in schools designed to make children into conditioned robots of the State, the art of persuasion has displaced the simple virtue of truth.

Since the end of the Second World War we have been bombarded from all sides with references to the Western world’s “Judeo-Christian religion,” and “our Judeo-Christian heritage.” We are told by both church leaders and scholars that our society is based on a supposed “Judeo-Christian tradition”.

The notion of “Judeo-Christian religion” is an unquestioned – almost sacrosanct – part of both secular and church thinking. American Christian leader Prof. Franklin H. Littel, a vocal supporter of the Zionist state, frankly declared that “to be Christian is to be Jewish,” and that consequently it was the duty of a Christian to put support for the “land of Israel” above all else. Pat Boon, the North American singer and evangelist, said there are two kinds of Judaism, one Orthodox and the other Christian.

Yet such a decidedly Christian Zionist outlook is to say the least, wildly simplistic and profoundly ahistorical. As the astute Jewish writer, Joshua J. Adler, points out, “The differences between Christianity and Judaism are much more than merely believing in whether the messiah already appeared or is still expected, as some like to say.”

The comments of Jewish author Mr. S. Levin may well explain the Christian’s need for the Judeo-Christian myth. Writing in the Israeli journal Biblical Polemics, Levin concludes: “‘After all, we worship the same God’, the Christian always says to the Jew and the Jew never to the Christian. The Jew knows that he does not worship the Christ-God but the Christian orphan needs to worship the God of Israel and so, his standard gambit rolls easily and thoughtlessly from his lips. It is a strictly unilateral affirmation, limited to making a claim on the God of Israel but never invoked with reference to other gods. A Christian never confronts a Moslem or a Hindu with ‘After all, we worship the same God’.”

Back in 1992 both Newsweek magazine and the Israeli Jerusalem Post newspaper simultaneously printed extensive articles scrutinising the roots of the sacrosanct Judeo-Christian honeymoon!

The statement heading the Newsweek article read: “Politicians appeal to a Judeo-Christian tradition, but religious scholars say it no longer exists.” The Jerusalem Post article’s pull quote announced: “Antisemitism is a direct result of the Church’s teachings, which Christians perhaps need to re-examine.”

“For scholars of American religion,” Newsweek states, “the idea of a single Judeo-Christian tradition is a made-in-America myth that many of them no longer regard as valid.” It quotes eminent Talmudic scholar Jacob Neusner: “Theologically and historically, there is no such thing as the Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s a secular myth favoured by people who are not really believers themselves.”

Newsweek cites authorities who indicate that “the idea of a common Judeo-Christian tradition first surfaced at the end of the 19th century but did not gain popular support until the 1940s, as part of an American reaction to Nazism . . ,” and concludes that, “Since then, both Jewish and Christian scholars have come to recognize that — geopolitics apart — Judaism and Christianity are different, even rival religions.”

The Jerusalem Post accused the Christian Church of being responsible for the Holocaust. The French Jewish scholar Jules Isaac was quoted as saying: “Without centuries of Christian catechism, preaching, and vituperation, the Hitlerian teachings, propaganda and vituperation would not have been possible.”

“The problem,” concludes the Jerusalem Post, “is not, as some assert, that certain Christian leaders deviated from Christian teachings and behaved in an un-Christian manner; it is the teachings themselves that are bent.”

Joshua Jehouda, a prominent French Jewish leader, observed in the late 1950s: “The current expression ‘Judaeo-Christian’ is an error which has altered the course of universal history by the confusion it has sown in men’s minds, if by it one is meant to understand the Jewish origin of Christianity . . . If the term ‘Judaeo-Christian’ does point to a common origin, there is no doubt that it is a most dangerous idea. It is based on a ‘contradictio in abjecto’ which has set the path of history on the wrong track. It links in one breath two ideas which are completely irreconcileable, it seeks to demonstrate that there is no difference between day and night or hot and cold or black and white, and thus introduces a fatal element of confusion to a basis on which some, nevertheless, are endeavouring to construct a civilisation.” (l’Antisemitisme Miroir du Monde pp. 135-6).

What is the Truth?

Is there then any truth in this term, “Judeo-Christian”? Is Christianity derived from Judaism? Does Christianity have anything in common with Judaism?

Reviewing the last two thousand years of Western Christian history there is really no evidence of a Judeo-Christian tradition and this has not escaped the attention of honest Christian and Jewish commentators.

The Jewish scholar Dr. Joseph Klausner in his book Jesus of Nazareth expressed the Judaic viewpoint that “there was something contrary to the world outlook of Israel” in Christ’s teachings, “a new teaching so irreconcilable with the spirit of Judaism, “ containing “within it the germs from which there could and must develop in course of time a non-Jewish and even anti-Jewish teaching.”

Dr. Klausner quotes the outstanding Christian theologian, Adolf Harnack, who in his last work rejected the hypothesis of the Jewish origin of Christ’s doctrine: “Virtually every word He taught is made to be of permanent and universal humanitarian interest. The Messianic features are abolished entirely, and virtually no importance is attached to Judaism in its capacity of Jesus’ environment.”

Gershon Mamlak, an award- winning Jewish Zionist intellectual, recently claimed that the “Jesus tradition” is essentially the ultimate extension of ancient Greek Hellenism and is in direct conflict to Judaism’s “role as the Chosen people”.

Dr. Mamlak, writing in the Theodor Herzl Foundation’s magazine of Jewish thought, Midstream, maintains that the prevailing theory that Christianity originated in the spiritual realm of Judaism “is anchored in a twofold misconception: 1) the uniqueness of Judaism is confined to its monotheistic God-concept; 2) the ‘parting of the ways’ between the Jesus coterie and Judaism is seen as the result of the former’s adaptation of the doctrines of Christology.”

The first misconception means: “When the affinity of the Jesus coterie with Judaism is evaluated by common faith in the One, severed from the believer’s duty to execute the Law of the One and to acknowledge the Chosen Nation of Israel as His instrument-faith in the One becomes anti-Judaism par excellence!”

In Gershon Mamlak’s view, “The conflict between Judaism and the Jesus tradition goes beyond the confines of theology. [The Jesus tradition] was the cosmopolitan renunciation of the national phenomenon in general and extreme hostility to Israel’s idea of a Chosen Nation as the divine instrument for the perfection of the world.”

Evidently the concept of a common Judeo-Christian tradition has more to do with post 1945 politics and a certain amount of ‘public relations’ than it does with historical and Biblical reality. Never the less a number of modern Christian polemicists have managed to rest certain New Testament verses in the drive to give a Scriptural basis to their argument.

Confusion over the origin of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity is the root of the Judeo-Christian myth.

Biblical scholars Robert and Mary Coote clearly show in their book Power, Politics and the Making of the Bible that neither is Christianity a patched up Judaism, nor is Rabbinic Judaism automatically synonymous with the religion of Moses and the old Hebrews.

The Cootes’ illustrate the religious climate in Judea two millennia ago: “The cults, practices, and scriptures of both groups, rabbis and bishops, differed from those of the temple; thus we reserve the terms Jew, Jewish, and Judaism for the rabbis and those under their rule and use Judean, contrary to custom, for the common source of Judaism and Christianity….”

“Despite the ostensible merging of Judean and Jew even in certain New Testament passages and by the rabbis who became rulers of Palestine in the third century and continued to use Hebrew and Aramaic more than Greek, the roots of Christianity were not Jewish. Christianity did not derive from the Judaism of the pharisees, but emerged like Judaism from the wider Judean milieu of the first century. Both Christians and Jews stemmed from pre-70 Judean-ism as heirs of groups that were to take on the role of primary guardians or interpreters of scripture as they developed on parallel tracks in relation to each other.” (Power, Politics, and the Making of the Bible).

The few New Testament ‘proof texts’ utilised by Christian Zionists and secular proponents of the modern Judeo-Christian myth are the product of poor translation. Messianic Jewish writer Malcolm Lowe in his paper “Who Are the Ioudaioi?” concludes, like Robert and Mary Coote, that the Greek word “Ioudaioi” in the New Testament should be translated as “Judeans”, rather than the more usual “Jews”. The Israeli scholar David Stern also came to the same conclusion when translating the Jewish New Testament.

Few Christians are aware that the translators of Scripture often mistranslated the word “Jew” from such words as “Ioudaioi” (meaning from, or being of: as a geographic area, Judean). The word Judean, mistranslated as “Jew” in the New Testament, never possessed a valid religious connotation, but was simply used to identify members of the native population of the geographic area known as Judea.

Also it is important to understand that in the Scriptures, the terms “Israel”, “Judah” and “Jew” are not synonymous, nor is the House of Israel synonymous with the House of Judah. The course of history is widely divergent for the peoples properly classified under each of these titles. Accordingly, the authoritative 1980 Jewish Almanac says, “Strictly speaking it is incorrect to call an ancient Israelite a Jew or to call a contemporary Jew an Israelite or a Hebrew.”

A writer for The Dearborn Independent, published in Michigan back in 1922, summarised the problem thus: “The pulpit has also the mission of liberating the Church from the error that Judah and Israel are synonymous. The reading of the Scriptures which confuse the tribe of Judah with Israel, and which interpret every mention of Israel as signifying the Jews, is at the root of more than one-half the confusion and division traceable in Christian doctrinal statements.”

Jesus Christ and the Pharisees

The New Testament Gospels reveal an intense conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees, one of the two principal Judean religious sects (see Matthew chapter 3, verse 7; Matthew chapter 5, verse 20; Matthew chapter 23, verses 13-15, 23-29; Mark chapter 8, verse 15; Luke chapter 11, verse 39). Much of this controversy was centered on what was later to become the foundation and highest authority of Judaism, the Talmud. In the time of Jesus Christ, this bore the name of “The Tradition of the Elders” (see Matthew chapter 15, verses 1-9).

The Judean historian Josephus wrote: “What I would now explain is this, that the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses . . .”

While the Pharisees recognized the laws of Moses, they also claimed that there was a great body of oral tradition which was of at least equal authority with the written Law – and many claimed that the Tradition was of greater authority. By their tradition, they undertook to explain and elaborate upon the Law. This was the “Tradition of the Elders”, to which the name of Talmud was later given. It had its beginning in Babylon, during the Babylon captivity of the people of Judah, where it developed in the form of the commentaries of various rabbis, undertaking to explain and apply the Law. This was the foundation of Rabbinic Judaism.

This Judaism was very different from the religion of the ancient Israelites. The late Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who was the Chief Rabbi of the United States, expressed this conclusively when he said: “The return from Babylon, and the adoption of the Babylonian Talmud, marks the end of Hebrewism, and the beginning of Judaism.” The Jewish Encyclopedia tells us that the Talmud is actually “the product of the Palestinian and Babylonian schools” and is generally referred to as “the Babylonian Talmud”.

Dr. Boaz Cohen in Everyman’s Talmud states the Talmud is the work of “numerous Jewish scholars over a period of some 700 years, roughly speaking, between 200 [B.C.] and 500 [A.D.].”

Rabbi Louis Finkelstein in Volume 1 of The Pharisees, the Sociological Background of their Faith says, “Pharisaism became Talmudism, Talmudism became Medieval Rabbinism, and Medieval Rabbinism became Modern Rabbinism. But throughout these changes of name, inevitable adaption of custom, and adjustment of Law, the spirit of the ancient Pharisee survives unaltered.”

According to The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. VIII, (1942) p.474 : “The Jewish religion as it is today traces its descent, without a break, through all the centuries, from the Pharisees. Their leading ideas and methods found expression in a literature of enormous extent, of which a very great deal is still in existence. The Talmud is the largest and most important single member of that literature.”

Moshe Menuhim explains that the Babylonian Talmud embodied all the laws and legends, all the history and ‘science,’ all the theology and folklore, of all the past ages in Jewish life – a monumental work of consolidation. In the Talmud, Jewish scholarship and idealism found their exclusive outlet and preoccupation all through the ages, all the way up to the era of Enlightenment. It became the principal guide to life and object of study, and it gave Judaism unity, cohesion and resilience throughout the dark ages.

The Talmud, more than any other literature, so defined Judaism that Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser admitted, “Judaism is not the religion of the Bible.” (Judaism and the Christian Predicament, 1966, p.159) It is the Talmud that guides the life and spirit of the Jewish people.

“The Talmud is to this day the circulating heart’s blood of the Jewish religion. Whatever laws, customs, or ceremonies we [Jews] observe – whether we are Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or merely spasmodic sentimentalists – we follow the Talmud. It is our common law.” (A History of the Jews, Solomon Grayzel).

Both Jewish and Christian scholars agree that it was Jesus Christ’s flagrant rejection of this “Tradition of the Elders” and his open confrontation with the powerful Pharisees that created the climate that led to his death. Historically, Christian thinkers argued that the Talmud was directly responsible for the rejection of Christ.

In their view these “traditions” blinded the eyes of the people to a true understanding of the prophecies which related to the coming of the Messiah.

Defining Christianity

If, as we have seen, the Pharisees and the Talmud forever defined Judaism, then most certainly the writings of the post-Apostolic Christian church leaders help us in understanding the relationship of the early Christian faith to both paganism and Judaism.

Justin Martyr (c100-165 A.D.) was indeed the earliest and most significant of these post- Apostolic church apologists. Following in the theological footsteps of Paul, who taught that the Gospel was the fulfilment of Moses and the Prophets, Justin argued that the Gospel was in the mind of God from the beginning and it was given to Abraham and the righteous Patriarches long before Judaism existed. This is in keeping with the Gospel teaching that the Hebrew Scriptures find their ‘flowering’ in the life, purpose, and accomplishments of Jesus the Christ.

Hence, the Christian faithful have traditionally understood the Old Testament through the New Testament.

In his Dialogue with Trypho Justin seeks to persuade a Jew of the truth of Christianity. Unlike the other apologists, he focuses mainly on the nature and meaning of Christ. Christ was the Logos who inspired the Greek philosophers and is present in all men as the Logos spermatikos (seminal reason or word). Through Him, the best of the philosophers were able to produce significant works of theology and philosophy. Their ideas could serve as beacons of truth just as much as could the inspired writings of the Old Testament Hebrews. Those who lived according to the Logos, even before Christ, were Christians. In the Old Testament it was the Logos who was revealed as God, because the transcendent Heavenly Father could not thus speak to man.

Justin wrote in Apology:

“We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word [or reason] of whom all mankind partakes. Those who lived reasonably [with the Word] are Christians, even though they have been called atheists. For example: among the Greeks, Socrates, Heraclitus and men like them; among the barbarians [non-Greeks], Abraham…and many others whose actions and names we now decline to recount, because we know it would be tedious.”

Christianity, seen through Justin Martyr’s writings, takes on a ‘cosmic’ breadth:

“I both boast and strive with all my strength to be found a Christian…Whatever things were rightly said by any man, belong to us Christians. For next to God we worship and love the Word, who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since He also became man for our sakes, that by sharing in our sufferings He might also bring us healing. For all those writers were able to see reality darkly, through the seed of the implanted Word within them.” (2 Apology).

Jesus Christ had come, argued Justin, to restore true religion and to denounce the hypocrisy of the religion of Judea. For that crime Jesus had been crucified. Consequently, Christianity is not a form of Judaism or simply Jewish prophecies fulfilled but ‘the true philosophy’.

Justin’s Christianity was eventually reducible to three major principles: (1) worship of God, mostly through private prayer and communication of being; (2) belief in an after-life with rewards and punishments for one’s actions in this world; and (3) the importance of leading a virtuous life in imitation of Christ and in obedience to His commandments.

The Romans killed Justin for his religion. He was ever known as Justin Martyr, and not as St. Justin. His works defined Christianity as a culminating religion and a “universal” faith incorporating the essential and perennial truth of the pre-Christian religious tradition. Christianity was the restatement of a very old doctrine encompassing the Old Testament and the grand verities of the ancients. Two centuries later Augustine again clarified the Christian faith in these terms when he wrote:

“That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist from the planting of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.”

Justin not only showed that Christ is the culmination and completion of all the partial knowledge of truth in Greek philosophy, He is also the culmination of the history of ancient Israel. According to Justin Jesus Christ is Israel and because of Him the church now bears the name of Israel.

This is to say, therefore, that the central message of the Old Testament has been fulfilled in the New Testament. It must be understood that this was the position of Christendom for at least 1900 years. It was the position, not only of Justin Martyr, but of such Stalwart saints as Irenaeus and Hippolytus; a position embraced by Martin Luther and John Calvin, the two towering figures of the Protestant Reformation.

Here we have not only a clear separation of Christianity and Judaism, but a direct challenge to Judaism’s core dogma of a Chosen Nation. A point which has not been lost by Jewish writers.

We read in Zionist author Uri Zimmer’s Torah-Judaism and the State of Israel: “The Jewish people, Rabbi Judah Halevy (the famous medieval poet and philosopher) explains in his ‘Kuzari’, constitutes a separate entity, a species unique in Creation, differing from nations in the same manner as man differs from the beast or the beast from the plant…although Jews are physically similar to all other men, yet they are endowed with a ‘second soul’ that renders them a separate species.”

Fraud

Traditionally Jewish scholars, as we have shown, were highly critical of the Judeo-Christian myth. There are many others, under the influence of modernism and secular Zionism, who do see some advantage in it.

Rabbi Martin Siegel, reflecting a Messianic zeal, was quoted in the 18 January 1972 edition of New York Magazine as declaring: “I am devoting my lecture in this seminar to a discussion of the possibility that we are now entering a Jewish century, a time when the spirit of the community, the non-ideological blend of the emotional and rational and the resistance to categories and forms will emerge through the forces of anti-nationalism to provide us with a new kind of society. I call this process the Judaization of Christianity because Christianity will be the vehicle through which this society becomes Jewish.”

While historic Christianity has looked to the eventual triumph of the Kingdom of God throughout the earth, according to the Zionist leaders Talmudic Judaism is zealous in the “drive to perfect man’s earthly habitat” (Gershon Mamlak, Midstream, Jan., 1989, p.31).

Dr. Mamlak admits that “many Jews have filled the ranks of the various revolutionary movements” (op. cit., p.32) in order to satisfy this urge. [But who can agree on the terms of the social contract? Were the Zionist Irgun and Stern gangs who terrorised and massacred the Palestinian Arabs in the campaign to establish the Israeli state, shining role models for young Jews? What about the immorality of “the end justifies the means”?]

Rabbi Michael Higger, renowned Talmudic scholar, in his book The Jewish Utopia, discusses the reshaping of the world into a Jewish Eden. The victory of this Utopia is inexorably tied to the coming of the Jewish Messiah.

“And the Messianic Age,” argues the eloquent Jewish Zionist author Leon Simon, “means for the Jew not merely the establishment of peace on earth and good will to men, but the universal recognition of the Jew and his God. . . For Judaism has no message of salvation for the individual soul, as Christianity has; all its ideas are bound up with the existence of the Jewish nation.” (Studies in Jewish Nationalism).

Driven by political agendas compromising Jews and compromising Christians began, only in this century, to disseminate the theretofore unheard of doctrine that Christianity originated from Judaism and that the two share a common worldview.

Dr. Gordon Ginn, an American Christian scholar, made a very valid point when he noted: “It is most interesting, indeed, that rabbis as well as Jewish scholars such as Mamlak and White agree with orthodox, historical Christianity that ‘Judeo-Christian’ is a contradiction in terms, even though that truth is yet to be discovered by contemporary evangelical and fundamentalist Christians” (Smyrna, August, 1993).

Christianity and Judaism are two distinct religious inheritances, despite all the superficial attempts by modern scholars to manufacture a naive “Judeo-Christianity.” The very term “Judeo-Christian” is a mischievous misnomer without historical or Scriptural validity.

The religions of the world are the product of progressive revelation to a diverse humanity, separately expressing as they do the great metaphysical realities of life. Attempts to distort or eliminate these unique, ancient and divinely ordained patterns, through non-divine syncretism and politically- motivated concoctions, is both anti-traditional and truly diabolical.

Appeals to a nonexistent historical unity and calls for a banal, modernist theology do nothing for religious understanding and mutual respect. “Judeo-Christianity” should be seen for what it is – another secular twentieth century fraud, manufactured for narrow political ends, that is supremely disrespectful to all true believers.

Any fundamental unity that does exist between world religions cannot be appreciated by ignorant and secular scholarship, but only through knowledge of the great primordial and universal truths.

As Luc Benoist aptly wrote, “Our age is seeking a universal understanding which men of vision can already foresee and which is the longing of all great souls. There is ample evidence that the world’s economic problems can be solved without the different religions having to abandon their unique spiritual insights; after all, brotherly agreement does not prevent the individual growth of each member of the family, bodily separate, but united in heart and mind.” (The Esoteric Path).

Who are the Jews?

“Edom is in modern Jewry” (The Jewish Encyclopedia, 1925 edition, Vol. 5, Page 41).

“The Edomites were conquered by John Hyrcanus who forcibly converted them to Judaism, and from then on they constituted a part of the Jewish people, Herod being one of their descendants” (The Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966, p. 594; Also The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977, p. 589).

“From this time the Idumeans became an inseparable part of the Jewish people,” Encyclopedia Judaica Jerusalem, in Volume 8, p. 1147).

“When, years before, John Hyrcanus had forced Judaism on the Idumeans he evidently conjectured that the new, though unwilling, converts could learn to identify their own destiny with that of his people,” (The Jews, their History, Culture, and Religion, p. 121).

“Jews began in the 19th century to call themselves Hebrews and Israelites in 1860” (Encyclopedia Judaica, 1971 Vol 10:23).

“. . . this would mean that their ancestors came not from the Jordan but from the Volga; not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that GENETICALLY THEY ARE MORE RELATED TO THE HUN, UIGUR, AND MAGYAR TRIBES THAN TO THE SEED OF ABRAHAM, ISAAC, AND JACOB. . . ” (Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, (Random House, 1976, p. 17). judeochr.htm

Bat Ye’or has tried to make a living from her invention of ‘Eurabia’ that she elaborates as – ‘dimmitude’ of Europe – a myth which is factually more fantastic than ‘Area 51‘. She has concocted such fabrications for bigoted minds who view the world in terms of races rather than ideas. Before it was the likes of Nazis and Fascist, now it is the likes of Breiviks, Neo-Nazis and pseudo-intellectual conspirator Neo-Cons, whether in Europe or in the United States, whether they speak from the pulpit or their respective dungeons, it is these receptive minds that Bat Ye’or caters to.

Facts as found in ground statistics dispel the rumors of Bat Ye’or’s – ‘dimmitude’ of Europe. According to Pew Research Center [‘MAPPING THE GLOBAL MUSLIM POPULATION’, p. 21, pdf download] the Muslims population in Europe is as follows:

Europe (50 countries and territories)

Europe has about 38 million Muslims, constituting about 5% of its population. European Muslims make up slightly more than 2% of the world’s Muslim population.

Readers should bear in mind that estimates of the numbers of Muslims in Europe vary widely because of the difficulty of counting new immigrants. Nevertheless, it is clear that most European Muslims live in eastern and central Europe. The country with the largest Muslim population in Europe is Russia, with more than 16 million Muslims, meaning that more than four-in-ten European Muslims live in Russia. While most Muslims in western Europe are relatively recent immigrants (or children of immigrants) from Turkey, North Africa or South Asia, most of those in Russia, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria belong to populations that are centuries old, meaning that more than six-in-ten European Muslims are indigenous. [Emphasis added]

Despite the limitations of the underlying data for Europe, it appears that Germany is home to more than 4 million Muslims – almost as many as North and South America combined. This means that Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon (between 2 million and 3 million) and more than any other country in western Europe. This also puts Germany among the top-10 countries with the largest number of Muslims living as a minority population. While France has a slightly higher percentage of Muslims than Germany, this study finds that it has slightly fewer Muslims overall. The United Kingdom is home to fewer than 2 million Muslims, about 3% of its total population.

The European countries with the highest concentration of Muslims are located in eastern
and central Europe: Kosovo (90%), Albania (80%), Bosnia-Herzegovina (40%) and Republic of Macedonia (33%). Greece is about 3% Muslim, while Spain is about 1% Muslim. Italy has one of the smallest populations of Muslims in Europe, with less than 1% of its population being Muslim.

At least the above numbers point to the fact that 60% of Muslims in Europe ‘belong to populations that are centuries old, meaning that more than six-in-ten European Muslims are indigenous‘, and are more European by blood than Bat Ye’or herself who is an immigrant from Egypt, married to a British, and is now speaking for Europe, that on the face of it is an outrageous case of her being more ‘whiter than white’. Her fabrication of Eurabia is racially disgusting and reeks of her racist mind. It is insulting to Arabs and Muslims alike, because not all Arabs are Muslims and neither are all Muslims as Arabs.

Still, only 40% of European Muslims are immigrants themselves or are first generation children of immigrants. The percentage of such newer arrivals only contributes to less than about 2% of European Muslim population. The myth of explosive Muslim fertility rate in Europe and their consequent – ‘dimmitude’ of Europe – is debunked by another study of Pew Research Center, which is summarized and commented by Reuters in an article as follows:

Will Pew Muslim birth rate study finally silence the “Eurabia” claim? [By Tom Heneghan January 27, 2011, Reuters]

One of the most wrong-headed arguments in the debate about Muslims in Europe is the shrill “Eurabia” claim that high birth rates and immigration will make Muslims the majority on the continent within a few decades. Based on sleight-of-hand statistics, this scaremongering (as The Economist called it back in 2006) paints a picture of a triumphant Islam dominating a Europe that has lost its Christian roots and is blind to its looming cultural demise.

The Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye’or popularised the term with her 2005 book “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis” and this argument has become the background music to much exaggerated talk about Muslims in Europe. Some examples from recent weeks can be found here, here and here.

A good example is the video “Muslim Demographics,” an anonymous diatribe on YouTube that has racked up 12,680,220 views since being posted in March 2009. Among its many dramatic but unsupported claims are that France would become an “Islamic republic” by 2048 since the average French woman had 1.8 children while French Muslim women had 8.1 children — a wildly exaggerated number that it made no serious effort to document. It also predicted that Germany would turn into a “Muslim state” by 2050 and that “in only 15 years” the Dutch population would be half Muslim. “Some studies show that, at Islam’s current rate of growth, in five to seven years, it will be the dominant religion of the world,” the video declares as it urges viewers to “share the Gospel message in a changing world.”

The BBC produced its own video entitled “Welcome to Eurabia?” that gave a point-by-point rebuttal of the video’s claims. Watching “Muslim Demographics” and “Welcome to Eurabia?” back-to-back provides a useful lesson in the dark art of twisting statistics. The image at left, shows a fictional flag of “Eurabia” created by Oren Neu Dag.

Articles defending the “Eurabia” claim have often been so shrill that they essentially discredited themselves as serious arguments. But it could be difficult to find a solid statistics that gave an overall view of what was actually happening. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has stepped up with an impressive study entitled “The Future of the Global Muslim Population” (here’s the press release, report and graphics here). As we summarised it in our report Muslim birth rate falls, slower population growth:

Falling birth rates will slow the world’s Muslim population growth over the next two decades, reducing it on average from 2.2 percent a year in 1990-2010 to 1.5 percent a year from now until 2030, a new study says.

Muslims will number 2.2 billion by 2030 compared to 1.6 billion in 2010, making up 26.4 percent of the world population compared to 23.4 percent now, according to estimates by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life…

“The declining growth rate is due primarily to falling fertility rates in many Muslim-majority countries,” it said, noting the birth rate is falling as more Muslim women are educated, living standards rise and rural people move to cities.

The proven demographic fact that birth rates have been falling among Muslim women, both in Muslim majority countries and western countries where Muslims have migrated, is not new. Nor are articles debunking the idea that Muslims will become the majority in Europe (see here and here and here). But my own experience in discussing this with non-Muslims in Europe and the United States says this message does not seem to be getting through. The fact that Muslim birth rates, while still higher than those for non-Muslims, are actually falling seems to surprise people who do not follow these issues closely.

There are many legitimate questions concerning Muslim minorities in western countries. Should Muslim women be allowed to cover their faces in public? Do state schools have to provide halal meals? Does sharia have any place in the western legal system? Should Muslims be allowed to pray in the streets? What does the decline of Christianity in Europe mean for the continent? These issues have to be debated openly –“The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom,” as Yahya Hendi, the Muslim chaplain at the Catholic university Georgetown in Washington put it at a conference at UNESCO in Paris two years ago. But while citizens have a right to have their own opinions, they can’t just make up their own “facts” and expect to be taken seriously. Twisting statistics only distorts the debate and risks leading to unfounded conclusions.

This study raises further questions that the Pew Forum cannot yet answer. The report’s preface asks “Is Islam the world’s fastest-growing religion? If Islam is growing in percentage terms, does that mean some of the world’s other major faiths are shrinking? Is secularism becoming more prevalent, or less?” It doesn’t yet have the data, but it plans to issue a similar report on the prospects for Christianity worldwide next year, followed up by others analysing the trends for “other major world faiths, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Judaism. We will also look at the size and growth of the population that is not affiliated with any religious tradition.”

What do you think? Is this report a surprise? Which interesting trends could the other reports bring to light?

UPDATE: In a telephone conference with journalists later on Thursday, Pew Forum researchers commented on the study. I asked what the results said about the “Eurabia” claim.

Senior researcher Brian Grim said: “Across the next 20 years, we’re only seeing a 2 percent rise in the total share of Europe that is Muslim. We’re projecting that the growth rate is slowing. So this rise is very very modest. It’s a relatively small share of the overall population in Europe… There’s no real scenario that we’ve looked at that this ‘Eurabia’ scenario would come to be.”

Alan Cooperman, associate director for research, said the percentages of Muslims in some European populations would rise from 3 to 5 percent to between 6 and 10 percent by 2030. “Those are substantial increases but they are very far from the ‘Eurabia’ scenario of runaway growth,” he said. “We do not see either worldwide or in Europe runaway growth. The growth rates are slowing.”

Third myth of Bet Ye’or i.e. – isolation of United States from a ‘dhimmified’ Europe – finds no basis to exist or to be commented upon, because the history and statistics disprove the contingent myths of Judeo-Christian values and ‘dhimmified’ Europe to begin with. Thus, Bat Ye’or falls on her face when she claims that America will be isolated from a dimmmified Europe. Still, the likes of Spencer, Trifkovic, Bat Ye’or and others have been able to implant certain myths in the West mind against Islam, which are addressed and debunked in Huffington Post [9/10/12], where the author Doug Saunders writes:

10 Myths About Muslims in the West

In my new book The Myth of the Muslim Tide, I chronicle the widespread misunderstanding of Muslim immigration to the West. As with Jews and Catholics before, I discuss that Muslims are being seen as an impossible-to-integrate, fast reproducing invasion force who follow a religion that’s more an ideology of conquest than a faith. Using the latest facts and figures, I illustrate the far less alarming truth about these new arrivals.

Here are 10 common myths about Muslims in the West:

1. Muslims have a higher birth rate than other religions, and will take over the world by population

Two generations ago, it seemed as if Islamic countries were destined for out-of-control population growth. People spoke of an “Islamic fertility rate” – more than 5 children per family, on average – and predicted minaret spires foresting the Earth.

Today, it is readily apparent that Islam is not connected with population growth. Just look at Iran, the world’s only Islamic theocracy, where the average family had around 7 children in the 1980s – and has 1.7 today, a lower rate than France or Britain. Or look at the United Arab Emirates, with 1.9 children per family. Or Turkey, ruled by an elected party of devout Muslims for a decade, which now has 2.15 children per family. Or Lebanon, where, despite Hezbollah’s rise, has only 1.86 children per family (so that its population will be shrinking).

Around the world, the average Muslim family size has fallen from 4.3 children per family in 1995 to 2.9 in 2010, and is expected to fall below the population-growth rate, and converge with Western family sizes, by mid-century. This is a crucial sign that Muslim societies are undergoing a major modernizing, secularizing wave – even if they elect Islamist parties while doing so.

2. Immigrants from Muslim countries are going to swamp us

People look at the huge families of many new Muslim immigrants and imagine them multiplying at exponential rates. But this is a bit of an illusion – as are many of the figures suggesting that Muslim immigrants have fertility rates higher than in their homelands. This is because most new immigrants have most of their children in the years immediately after their arrival. The way we calculate Total Fertility Rate – the measure of average family size – is by taking the total number of births a woman has had and extrapolating it across her fertile life. As a result, immigrants appear to have more children than they really do.

In reality, the family sizes of Muslim immigrant groups are converging fast with those of average Westerners – faster, it seems, than either Jewish or Catholic immigrants did in their time. Muslims in France and Germany are now having only 2.2 children per family, barely above the national average. And while Pakistani immigrants in Britain have 3.5 children each, their British-born daughters have only 2.5. Across Europe, the difference between the Muslim and non-Muslim fertility rate has fallen from 0.7 to 0.4, and is headed toward a continent-wide convergence.

3. Muslims will become a majority in European countries

In fact, we now have several large-scale projections based on population-growth trends and immigration rates which show that the Muslim populations of Europe are growing increasingly slowly and that by the middle of this century – even if immigration rates are not reduced – the proportion of Muslims in Europe will probably peak somewhere short of 10% (it is currently around 7%). By that point, Muslims will have family sizes and age profiles not that different from Europe in general.

4. Muslims will become a dominant group of cultural outsiders in the United States

Despite the hysterical rhetoric coming from Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachmann and their ilk, Muslims there are not only a very tiny group, but they are also one of the most integrated groups in the country – especially if you consider that 69% of American Muslims are first-generation immigrants, and 71% of those immigrants arrived after 1990.

There are only 2.6 million Muslims in the United States today. By 2030, that number is likely to rise to 6.2 million (because Muslims are young and fertile) – at which point Muslim will be 1.7% of the population, almost as numerous as Jews and Episcopalians.

Even though they’re new, American Muslims tend to be economically successful and highly educated. With 40% of them holding a college degree, they’re the second most educated group after Jews – and far more educated than Americans in general, only 29% of whom have a degree

5. Muslim immigrants in the West hold the same backward views that Muslims do in the Middle East and Pakistan

Actually, Muslims change their cultural views dramatically when they emigrate. For example, 62% of American Muslims say that “a way can be found for the state of Israel to exist so that the rights of Palestinians are addressed” – a rate barely lower than that of average Americans (67%), and vastly ahead of the miniscule response among Middle Eastern Muslims – for whom between 20% and 40% agreed with that statement.

Similarly, 39% of American Muslims and 47% of German Muslims say they tolerate homosexuality, compared to single-figure responses in most Islamic countries – and those rates are rising with each immigrant generation. On these important questions, Muslim immigrants are converging with Western values fast.

6. Muslims in America are more loyal to their faith than their country

True, 49% of Americans from Muslim backgrounds say they consider themselves “Muslim first and American second” and 47% claim to attend a mosque on Friday. But you have to compare that to American Christians, 46% of whom say they identify themselves as “Christian first and American second” (that number rises to 70% among Evangelicals). And 45% of American Christians attend a church service every Sunday.

In other words, Muslims have adopted exactly the same rate of religious observance as the people around them in their host country. We see this just as strongly in France, where a fifth of Muslims are atheist and only 5% attend a mosque regularly – almost the same rate as French Christians.

7. Poor Muslims are flooding out of overpopulated countries into the West

In fact, the poorest most overpopulated Muslim countries are producing the least emigration – and very little of it is to the West. Immigration tends to come from the countries with the lowest population-growth rates, and it’s rarely to the closest countries.

Muslims are far from the largest immigrant group – even in countries that immediately adjoin the Islamic world. In Spain, which lies across a narrow state from poor Arab countries, only 13% of immigrants are Muslim: Most have come from Spanish-speaking countries across the Atlantic. In Britain, only 28% of immigrants are Muslim. And those numbers do not seem poised to increase.

8. Muslim immigrants are angry at the society around them

In fact, Muslim immigrants appear to be MORE satisfied with the world around them, and its secular institutions, than the general population. Muslim immigrants in the United States are more likely to say they are “satisfied with their lives” (84%) than average Americans are (75%) – and that number rises to 90% for American-born Muslims. Even among Muslims in neighourhoods where the community mosque has been vandalized – an increasingly frequent occurrence – fully 76% say that their community is an “excellent” or “good” place to live.

This usually extends into pride in national institutions. For example, 83% of British Muslims say they are “proud to be a British citizen,” versus only 79% of Britons in general – and only 31% of Muslims agree that “Britain’s best days are behind her,” versus 45% of Britons in general.

9. Muslims in the West cheer for terrorist violence

While it might seem chilling to learn that 8% of American Muslims feel that violence against civilian targets is “often or sometimes justified” if the cause is right, you have to compare that to the response given by non-Muslim Americans, 24% of whom said that such attacks are “often or sometimes justified.”

This is reflected in most major surveys. When a large-scale survey asked if “attacks on civilians are morally justified,” 1% of the French public, 1% of the German public and 3% of the British public answered yes; among Muslims, the responses were 2%, 0.5%, and 2%. Asked if it is “justifiable to use violence for a noble cause,” 7% of the French public agreed, along with 8% of French Muslims; 10% of the German public and fewer than 2% of German Muslims; 10% of the British public and 8% of British Muslims. This may well be because 85% of the victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslims.

10. Muslims have become so populous that the most common baby name in Britain is now Mohammed.

This is true – but it means far less than you’d think. In 2010, if you combined all 12 spelling variants of the Islamic prophet’s name, “Mohammed” was more popular than any other name given to new babies.

But that’s more a consequence of naming trends than anything else. In a great many Muslim cultures, ALL male babies are given “Mohammed” as an official first name. But among many Westerners – especially white Anglo-Saxons and black Christians – there has been an explosion in unorthodox baby names – as of 2011, these groups are 50% more likely than they were a generation ago to give their children uncommon baby names.

As a result, Mohammed manages to reach the Number 1 spot without being all that common – when combined, babies named after the Islamic prophet made up only 1% of British newborns in 2010.

References:
The Myth of a Judeo-Christian Tradition – The Information Clearing House and The Bible Believers
Mapping the Global Muslim Population – pdf download – Pew Research Center
Will Pew Muslim birth rate study finally silence the “Eurabia” claim? – Tom Heneghan January 27, 2011, Reuters
10 Myths About Muslims in the West – Doug Saunders, Huffington Post