Islam Exposed

Almost every ‘mainstream’ politician has said that Islam is a religion of peace and that Islam means peace. But are they telling the truth about Islam? To ask that question is to be almost sure of the answer. In fact the word Islam does not mean peace, it means submission; and the faith of Islam is very far from being peaceful in the means that is uses to spread and maintain both the religion itself and what it feels is its right to dominance over others - their lands, their thoughts, their cultures, their legal systems; and their whole state and political and economic system. Indeed, in denying the truth about Islam, the ‘mainstream’ politicians are engaged in a whole-scale scheme of falsehood. This is not unique by any means: they have done the same sort of thing with regard to the real nature and intent of what was at first put across merely as a Common Market; and they have, for several decades, been selling the idea of the multi-racial and multi-cultural society as though it was voluntary, had no dangers for us, and had been done with our consent. So it should not surprise us if there is something fishy about this new line that they have taken - after the September 11th attacks in New York and the London bombings - that Islam means peace; and that peace is all that there is to Islam. If only that were the case; but it is not.

There are certainly a number of different views on Islam. One viewpoint, which is quite prevalent, is that Islam is a religion of peace because it is a religion. Religion is all about peace, is it not? Christianity is about peace and all religions are about the same God; and so Islam, for that reason as well, will be peaceful. The suicide bombers were merely misguided young men who hijacked an essentially good religion and used it to an evil purpose, much like many have done with Christianity (the Crusades would be mentioned at this point); and they had been forced to such extremism by the provocation meted out to the Palestinians by the wicked West, the Israelis, and the Zionists. Poor suicide bombers, one might think. This is not so much a viewpoint as a blind spot - blind to every thing in front of it; and is not worthy of any further treatment however much it resonates with highly-paid human rights lawyer, Cherrie Blair.

A second view of Islam does not attribute the peace of Christianity to the religion of Mohammed quite so directly; it recognises that Islam is more than a Nazarene sect with a towel on its head, and that it does have a holy book and recorded traditions of its own; drawn from its own distinctive cultural and revelational milieu. Nonetheless, it too tends to equate religion with what we have come to expect of religion as heavily influenced in the West by our ethos of Christianity. The god of Islam may well be different, this view says, and his ways in many respects at variance to those of Jehovah; but - out of respect for multi-culturalism, and welcoming ‘the other’, as well as respect for the truth (and there can be no conflict between the two) - we cannot, and must not judge, Islam by our own far from perfect Western standards. Islam will likewise be tolerant of us if we only play fair: everyone is basically decent, and if we do the plain decent thing to them, they will surely reciprocate, since all cultures have much to give; and they do not really look upon us as ‘infidels’ anymore, if they ever really did.

A third view of Islam says that Islam is a violent religion implacably hostile to all that is good and non-Muslim in the world, known as ‘the abode of war‘; and that the design and intent of Islam is to wreak havoc, ruin, mayhem, and death upon all the heathen, Jews, and Christians - unless they either convert (Allah is merciful), or submit to pay the dhimmi tax, and agree to survive as second class citizens in a Muslim dominated state, where they have little influence and cannot proselytise. There can be no doubt that - in the light of many Koranic surahs (verses) and in the face both of Islamic sharia (law) and the written hadiths or traditions of what Mohammed said and did - there is much to commend itself in this view of Islam. And yet we all feel - if we know any Muslims, that is - that this view is very harsh on some or many of the Muslims that we do know, or did know, not so very long ago. They were the last people, we feel, who could turn on us, or harbour murderers, fanatical terrorists, or rapists in our midst. It smacks too much of the view, held in world war two, that every German was a Nazi; that all Nazis were bad; and that the only good German was a dead German. However, much truth there may be in the third view, it is being taken too far if it means something like that. And the fact of the matter, I think, is that the warlike character of Islam - though a very important part of the picture - is, yet, only part of the whole picture. It is not the whole truth. If it was the whole of the obvious truth about Islam, many - indeed, I believe, most Muslims - might recoil from Islam in horror.

Whenever we study any evil and totalitarian regime, whether religious or secular, we must understand that the truth or reality about it is much less obvious to those caught up in it than we usually suppose. So we must be careful in judging others. Evil comes in many guises, or should we say disguises; if it did not, it would have far fewer followers. And whatever you make of the suicide bombers, or mass murderers - and however hard this may be for us to take - some of them, at least, thought (in some way) that they were doing good: the will of a good Allah, and not that of a monster. I am by no means making an apology for radical or mainstream Islam (the two really only differ in tactics and pace, not in the ends and the means, if needed); but we still, as difficult as it may appear, have to see things from their point of view (as well as our own) before we finally evaluate their religion. This is known as empathy, and is quite different to sympathy.

So what is the whole truth about Islam. Well it will help if we evaluate it in its parts and then stand back from the canvass, so to speak, and see the whole: how each different part relates to every other part; what is each part’s character; and, vitally, what is the tendency and intent which emerges from the whole when put together -when the whole is much more than the sum of its parts when disconnected. An illustration may serve to help. Let us imagine a disassembled bicycle in all sits separate parts. We see that each part has a design and function - some parts are clearly moving parts, and some parts are fixed parts; and some parts do not seem to make any sense at all. The bell, to make noises, does not seem to be part of a bike but part of some strange musical band. Then if, in our minds at least, we put all these parts together correctly, we see that each part has a relation to the whole even when - considered in isolation - they did not quite seem to fit what we had heard about conveyances. It is like that with every political or belief system that we come across. Each part has a unique function (not always obvious) in relation to the other parts and in regard to the overall purpose; not merely of any one part, but of the whole together.

To change the picture somewhat let us not imagine a human artefact, such as a bicycle, but a living organism such as a cell. Every political or religious belief-system (and every scientific theory for that matter), if it is to survive and propagate - that is to convert and sustain confidence - it must be able to explain things and to fight off gainsaying arguments and conflicting evidence. Somewhere in the belief system there will be a set of values, and a collection of arguments, that act as a defence mechanism saying that the belief-system is good and worthy and that its competitors, opponents, or detractors are either wrong or bad, in some vital way, or both. And that is the subtlety of every belief system. Not everyone who was involved in the Holy Inquisition did so from the lowest of motives; quite the reverse. The same was true of every other form of evil. The French Revolution’s reign of terror was propagated by many who thought of doing only good and were loyal to the ideals of ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’; as the ‘brotherhood republics’ of Red China, North Korea, Viet Nam, and the Soviet Union were dedicated also to the ideal of ‘equality’. So the fact that Islam attracts good people with only good intentions, high morals, and respectable civic virtues should not surprise us. These other causes have done so too.

So, what do we make of Islam? Well it is essentially organised around a principle of violence, to put it crudely, or - to put it in a more nuanced and self-justifying way (remember the analogy of the cell fighting of its detractors) - it is Allah’s mandated way of converting the world to his truth preferably by persuasion, if possible, but by military jihad and compulsion, if need be.

Yes, Islam is a religion; but that means, in its own terms so different to the West, that it is an army too. It is also a one-party state and political system. Like any army every member is a warrior but not all warriors are combatants in the front line. All are literally in uniform so to speak (as you would expect of an army) but many only contribute indirectly to the overall job of ‘spreading the faith’ - just as with the bicycle only some of the parts contribute directly to its movement by moving themselves. Yes, the faith must be spread in the end by the sword if necessary; but only if necessary. In that sense Islam could well be seen as a religion of peace. And if the approach of peaceful persuasion does not succeed there are many other ways, short of actual violence, but involving force which can ‘persuade’. For example the show of force to induce the non-Muslim world to convert willingly or to be cowed into submission, may suffice. War and violence, terrorism and intimidation are only some of the means of carrying on the mission. In ‘peaceful’ Islamic theory, war should be the servant of the mission, not its master. So, yes, militant mainstream Islam does have a peaceful side to it. But then so too does a battleship. The USS Missouri did not have to always fire its guns in anger to have the needed effect. It could attain its objective, at times, merely by the threat of force or by its very appearance and presence. The use of force may not always be needed, or desirable. Voluntary conversions to Islam do take place when it is portrayed in the rose coloured spectacles of the Western ‘liberals’. So, why war when you can succeed without it? But, alas, those who perhaps willingly and winsomely come into Islam rarely, if ever, are so free or willing to renounce it. It is not the way into a religion which is important - to see whether the religion is free or not - but the way out of it, which is often the more telling.

Certainly many Muslims are wholly peaceful and would never do the kind of things that their religious compatriots would do; but does that matter? Not every part on the assembled bicycle was a moving part but the bicycle is nonetheless designed to move; and not every sailor on the USS Missouri was a gunner or an aimer, or a target-locater and identifier; but yet - whether cook or laundryman - all too obviously peaceful roles - each contributed an essential part to the fighting nature of the whole. We must not infer the role of the whole from the limited use and peaceful function of a part. What matters in that sense is not the individual but the whole. For it is as a whole that it operates.

It is mainstream Islamic policy in Europe, under the orders of the Muslim Council of Europe, that no Muslim can lead a good Muslim life outside of his community; that all Muslims can only express a good and religious life in community with other Muslims around a Mosque; and that Muslims must congregate as Muslims in specified areas (encampments?) from which they can dominate a locality and from which they can then spread out. The army has a strategy; and it looks like an army - a religious army but an army nonetheless. One can hardly blame it, in one sense, for following through, and working out in practice, the teachings of its own holy book together with the written down traditions of their prophet. Islam is behaving in character and according to its nature and its purposes as, it believes it is, God’s true and noble religion. The truth must dominate and prevail; and it must do so in this life. What is surprising about the whole situation is not the ‘suicide’ bombings, the honour killings, the violence and intimidation of the few over the many, the paedophile-weddings, the rapes and enslavings of those taken in war - for all these are part of its nature, its teachings, its principles and its history; what is surprising is that the self-styled ‘liberal’ and ‘do-gooder’ elite have imagined that it could have been otherwise. Perhaps, just perhaps, it could have been; but the fact is that it is not, nor is it likely to be, with the policies being vigorously perused by the current ‘powers that be’ over Islam and over the West. There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Thanks to my my good friend the Reverend Robert West (Christian Council of Britain) for his permission to reproduce this article. As with all posts feel free to link with acknowledgement.
The Lincolnshire Patriot