George W. Bush and others have often emphasized that Islam is a “religion of peace.” Others view Islam as a “religion of the sword,” and they include traditionalist-minded Muslims and mosques. This is evident after the French government recently raided Muslim houses of worship in the country and found “one third of the quantity of war-grade weapons that are normally seized in a year,” as Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve put it.
The mosques implicated themselves “because they are run illegally without proper licenses, they preach hatred, or use takfiri speech,” Hassan El Alaoui, one of France’s chief imams, told Al Jazeera on Wednesday; “takfiri” speech is that which levels accusations of apostasy at other Muslims. El Alaoui also reported that the government will shut down between 100 and 160 mosques, approximately five percent of the nation’s 2,600 total. In addition, authorities searched 2,235 Muslim businesses and homes and arrested 232 individuals.
In the wake of the November 13 Paris jihadist attacks that killed 130 people, however, it was the hardware found that was especially alarming. Writes Christine Niles at ChurchMilitant.com:
[S]everal of these [100-plus] mosques have been raided, revealing a “staggering” number of weapons and ammunition. Sunday, authorities conducted a raid on a mosque in Lagny-sur-Marne, 18 miles east of Paris, and uncovered 334 weapons and a large quantity of 7.62mm Kalashnikov ammunition, along with ISIS propaganda videos.
Police also turned up recordings of chants “glorifying the martyrs of jihad linked to the terrorist organization Jabhat al-Nusra,” the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. The chants were found among teaching materials for youth in a madrassa, or private religious school for boys, connected to the mosque.
Although this story has not been widely reported, it should further fuel debate about the nature of Islam and the effects of wide-scale Muslim migration into the West. This has been a major topic recently, with presidential contender Donald Trump suggesting that Muslim immigration should be suspended until we can “figure out what’s going on.”
And with the West being awash in relativism — and its correlative religious-equivalence doctrine, stating that all religions are morally equal — broaching this topic brings accusations of bigotry and “Islamophobia.” But Truth doesn’t bend to political correctness, and there’s certainly something “going on.” Consider, for instance, a German study released in 2010 and which involved 45,000 young people. It found that while increasing religiosity among Christian youths made them less violent, increasing religiosity among Muslim ones actually made them more violent.
And anecdotes to this effect abound. The Daily Telegraph reports today about 18-year-old Australian convert to Islam Alo-Bridget Namoa, who is allegedly now a supporter of Da’esh (ISIS), prays five times daily to Allah, and has said referring to herself and her Muslim husband, “I want to do an Islamic Bonnie and Clyde on the kaffir” (non-Muslim). The Daily Mail told the story yesterday of 33-year-old U.S. Army deserter and Muslim convert Daniel Seth Franey of Montesano, Washington, “who called Osama bin Laden ‘a beautiful man,’ made pro-Islamic State statements and called for the death of American troops,” the paper related. Then there was convert “John T. Booker Jr., 21, an American citizen also known as Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, …who vowed to ‘bring the Islamic State straight to your doorstep’ [and] pleaded guilty Wednesday to attempting to detonate a car bomb at Fort Riley military base in Kansas,” wrote CNN Feb. 4. And just two days before that, the Associated Press reported that North Carolina convert Justin Nojan Sullivan, 19, had “killed his neighbor and stole the man’s money so he could buy an assault rifle to carry out an Islamic State-inspired shooting at a concert or club”; Sullivan believed he could murder 1,000 people in his attack. Critics have dubbed these happenings “Sudden Jihad Syndrome,” and nary a week goes by — and maybe not even a day — without an instance of one occurring.
But while this phenomenon can seem sudden, it’s not new. As Professor Thomas F. Madden, chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, wrote in his 2002 essay “The Real History of the Crusades”:
While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity — and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion — has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered.
Some Muslims readily acknowledge this, too. Also just yesterday, we learned of Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who was convicted by an Indonesian court of conspiring with Da’esh and setting up a Jihadist training camp; writes the Deccan Chronicle of his statements in his own defense, “‘I hope judges understand that my deed of helping training camp in Aceh was my religious obligation,’ Bashir told the court. ‘I’m guilty according to the government law, but what I did is correct according to Islam.’” And then there’s what was reported just the day before. Quoting The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Jihad Watch related, “In a December 15 lecture about ISIS at the American University in Beirut, Abdel Bari Atwan, former editor-in-chief of ‘Al-Quds Al-Arabi’ and the current editor-in-chief of ‘Al-Rai Al-Youm’ rejected common claims that the savagery of ISIS is alien to Islam, presenting examples of similar conduct from Islamic history. Atwan said that the West faces two options: to contain ISIS or to destroy it.”
Of course, some may say the West has cultivated the worst of both worlds: disrupting the Mideast with misguided military endeavors while not containing Da’esh. And considering how Christendom is admitting countless thousands of impossible-to-vet Muslim migrants, these critics may ask, “How does it make sense for the West to send soldiers to fight in the Middle East if we’re going to bring the Middle East to the West?”
Unfortunately, what’s really “going on” isn’t hard to figure out: Awash in relativism, multiculturalism, and diversity doctrine, a morally confused Occident is facilitating “the soft Islamic conquest of the West,” as Muslim refugee Dr. Mudar Zahran put it last October. What Muslims “couldn’t do in the last 20 years,” he explained, “now the West is doing for us for free — and even paying for it.”
And pay for it we will.
