Guest Editorial

Special Issue: Islam, Culture, and the Charlie Hebdo Affair

The Dilemma of Islamic Terrorism

Ali Sina is the founder of faithfreedom.org an organization created by ex-Muslims to help Muslims leave Islam and the author of Understanding Muhammad.

The recent massacres in Paris of the staff of Charlie Hebdo and the Jews in a kosher supermarket have made more people concerned about the rise of terrorism. Tens of thousands have come out to demonstrate.

Since the 9/11 attack on New York and the Pentagon in 2001, there have been close to 25,000 terrorist attacks worldwide, all of which were perpetrated in the name of Islam. That is about 5 terrorist attacks every day. So far two million people have been killed and a similar number are maimed and injured. These attacks are becoming more frequent. Yet something is not changing.

- Immediately after the attack, the president or the prime minister of the country in which the attack has taken place goes on TV and declares that this attack had nothing to do with Islam.

- Right after that the chief of police announces that he has taken all the measures to protect Muslims from any imaginary backlash and nonexistent reprisal.

- In the evening of the same day the mainstream media interviews an imam or a Muslim spokesperson who emphasizes that Islam does not condone violence.

- We are then told that extremists exist in all religions and reminded that some thirty years ago a few Christians killed a few abortionist murderers of unborn babies.

- Then the pundits are called to pontificate that the root cause of Islamic terrorism is not in what the terrorist themselves say, and nothing to do with the Quran (that in hundreds of verses calls on the believers to kill the unbelievers), but in the injustice done to Muslims in other parts of the world, such as in Abu Ghraib prison and particularly in Palestine where half a century ago Israelis defeated the Arab invaders who had vowed to drown them in the sea.

- A few days after that the police and the politicians of the victim country hold meetings with the leaders of the Muslim community where they conclude that more money should be given to the “moderate Muslims” to persuade the “radicals” to not take their religion seriously.

- The experts also conclude that emblems like Christmas and Christmas trees hurt the religious sentiment of Muslims and they should be removed from public institutions, shopping malls and schools, while at the same time Muslims should be given some concessions, like not requiring them to wash their hands before performing operation on patients, designating a room and Islamic toilets for them in public institutions, and allow them to apply for driving license without requiring them to show their face.

- Also, in the spirit of integration and community cohesion, everyone should be forced to eat halal meat, which involves extra cruelty to the animals, without their knowledge, whether they want it or not.

This tune is replayed every time there is a terrorist attack. The narrative never changes, despite the unequivocal assertion of the terrorists themselves who make it clear they are motivated by the teachings and examples of their prophet and his promise of virgins. Methinks, the record of history is broken. How else can we explain that after a repetition of 25,000 times one would not question the validity of this narrative?

While politicians in western countries and the mainstream media are stuck in the above narrative, the truth is not hidden from the Muslims. Al Sisi, the president of Egypt, in his 2015 New Year’s speech in Al Azhar University, addressing top Sunni clerics said, “it is not possible that 1.6 billion people [reference to the world’s Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live.” Sisi did not blame Abu Ghraib, Israel, nor made other silly excuses for Islamic terrorism. He blamed the “ideology” of it. But the ideology—which says, kill the unbelievers so you go to paradise—comes straight from the Quran.

Sisi cannot go further than that. What he said is already too much and if he did not have the military behind him, he would have been thrown into jail. However, if a non-Muslim raises the same concerns raised by Sisi, they will be called racist and denounced as an Islamophobe.

We are told, “You can’t paint an entire group of people with the same wide brush.” But there is a war going on. People are being killed. We have to know our enemy. Who is the enemy?

Of course not everyone is the same. Although each individual is unique we can classify Muslims in three broad categories. In practice, an individual often belongs to two or three categories. The proportion of the overlap varies, and just as 18 decillion colors are created by the combination of just three colors and their intensity, the degree to which Muslims belong to each category gives rise to infinite diversity among them. No Muslim exists out of these three categories.

The first category is that of good Muslims. By good I mean true believers—those who follow the teachings of their prophet, the Quran and the Sunnah to the letter, who try to emulate him in every way and are strict and pious Muslims. Since the teachings and the examples of Muhammad are full of violence and terror, the more one follows and emulates him the more radical one becomes. Muhammad raided and butchered people merely because they were not his followers. The good Muslims do the same. All the bombings and terrorisms perpetrated by Muslims are replicas of Muhammad’s raids, or ghazwa, as he called them. Taking women as sex slaves, which the Islamic State and Boko Haram practice was also practiced by Muhammad and he sanctioned it in the Quran (33:50; 23: 1-6; 70:30; 4:24; 66:1-2). He ordered the assassination of his critics stoning the adulterers, chopping the hands of thieves and killing the apostates. So, the terrorists are actually good Muslims.

The second category is of bad Muslims. These are those who don’t practice their religion and are often ignorant of it. They may pray or chant the Quran, but have no clue of its content. They read it for thawab (reward) without understanding it. These Muslims are ordinary people we all know. Like everybody else, some are good and some are not so good. Some of them are friendly, but they see themselves as superior, by virtue of their faith, and of “higher morals.”

Morality in Islam has nothing to do with what others understand by this word. Morality for women is to cover their hair. For men, it is not to shake hands with Muslim women, or not to masturbate, etc. Morality in Islam is primarily about genitals and their use. For example, while having sex out of marriage is considered immoral; stoning people caught in such act is not immoral. While looking at bare arms and legs of Muslim women is considered immoral; raping non-Muslim women is not immoral.

These Muslims migrate to the west to better their lives, but they segregate themselves, form isolated communities and warn their children to not learn the ways of unbelievers or take them as friends unless they intent to convert them to Islam. They give huge amounts of money to charity. But Islamic charity has nothing to do with charity. All that money goes to build mosques, print Islamic materials and promote Islam. If any of that is spent for the needy, it is to enlist them for jihad. The bad Muslims are the lifeline of Islam and the breeding ground for good Muslims. All Muslim terrorists, unless they are converts, are born in and emerge from this group. Without the moral and financial support of the bad Muslims Islam will cease to exist.

Then we have the ugly Muslims. As we learned the good Muslims are not good at all, and the bad ones are not really bad people, the ugly Muslims actually look beautiful. Islam is a world down the rabbit hole. Nothing is what it is because everything is what it is not. The ugly Muslims are clean-shaven, handsome or attractive, eloquent, articulate, and highly intelligent, just the kind of people you want to hang around with. They are journalists, professors, regular guests and contributors to mainstream media. They know what to say to gain your approval and your applause. They are charming. Their words are reassuring and their faces are familiar. You like them and trust them. So why do I call them ugly? Because they lie! Their job is to deceive you and to make you believe that the “real Islam” poses no threat to you. These wolves in sheep clothing are the most dangerous group. Deception is deadlier than terror. Do you fear more a ferocious animal that you can see or a deadly virus that you can’t? The enemy within is a lot more dangerous.

Unlike the bad Muslims the ugly ones are not ignorant of their religion. They know of Muhammad’s raids, rapes, assassinations, genocides, tortures, beheadings, but they deny them, twist the facts and defend him. They accuse the good Muslims of having hijacked their religion of peace when they know they lie. They claim to be reformers when they know that Islam cannot be reformed. Islam is what it is. To reform Islam one has to change the Quran. Over 70% of it must be scrapped, and the other 30% is just sheer nonsense.

These self-styled reformers don’t want to change the Quran. They just want Muslims to practice it less. In theory it works. Even the deadliest poison, in small doses, is not lethal. But how can they convince all Muslims to not take their holy book seriously? This project is doomed from the start. This is either naiveté and wishful thinking, or a ruse to deceive the non-Muslims, to give them false hope so they can buy more time for Islam to take over the world, which is the goal of every Muslim, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Every Muslim falls within these three categories. Just as virtually all colors are combinations of the three primary colors, elements of the three categories of Muslims exist in all of them.

Not all Muslims are terrorists, but a substantial percentage of them are, and a greater percentage, condone terrorism. But does it really matter who is and who is not? If I give you 1,000 cups of good wine and tell you only one of them contains cyanide will you drink any of them? The terrorist are born, raised and protected by the “moderates.” They are indistinguishable from each other. It is delusional to think that the non-terrorist Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism. Where do the terrorists come from if not from the so-called moderate Muslims?

All Muslims support the ideology that wants to kill us. There are also good people (bad Muslims) among them, like al Sisi, who want to change this. They can’t, because the ideology against which they speak is Islam itself. The belief that Islam can be reformed from within is wishful thinking. Other religions allow change and adapt with times. Islam is like a fossil. What is written in the Quran cannot be changed and the problem with Islam is the Quran.

Islam cannot be reformed, but it can be eradicated. It cannot be molded, but it can be smashed and pulverized. This cannot be done from within. Growth happens from within. But if you want to demolish a building you have to get out of it. You can’t cut a branch while sitting on it.

The question is how to stop Islam. There are three ways, incidentally, one is good, one is bad and the other is ugly.

The good way to stop Islam is to spread the truth about it. Like darkness that cannot stand the light, lies cannot stand the truth. If we tell the truth about Muhammad and reveal his crimes, Islam will fall in no time. We can actually destroy Islam in less than two decades. All we need to do is tell the truth. Yes, truth will set us free. It really does! I myself have left Islam and have helped thousands to leave it with nothing but truth.

There are countless books and websites that tell the truth. The problem is that Muslims don’t read. Also many non-Muslims don’t read. The majority of people get their facts from the media. The ugly Muslims’ jihad is to muddy the waters so no one can learn the truth about their religion. When we quote passages from the Quran to show how vile and evil they are, they say we quote them out of context. But they never tell us in what context the hundreds of verses that call for killing the unbelievers can mean something else. The fact is that they are the ones who quote their book out of context to make it look tolerant. For example, the Sura 109 that says, “To you your religion and to me mine,” or the verse 2:256 that says, “There is no compulsion in religion,” or the verse 5:32 that says, “Whoever kills one person is as if he has killed all mankind,” are taken out of context. They have nothing to do with tolerance.

But there is a way to overcome this hurdle and that is to make a biopic of Muhammad, something beautiful that everyone wants to see for its artistic value and is factual and truthful. Most people have never read the Bible, but they know about Jesus and Moses through movies. We need to do the same for Muhammad. This is our best option and my preferred choice.

The second option is bad. It is to deport all Muslims back to their country of origin. It does not matter if they are second or third generation immigrants. Muslims do not see themselves as citizens of any non-Muslim country and their allegiance is not and cannot be to a country that is not controlled by them. If they tell you otherwise they would be going against the Quran 9:23 that says Muslims should not accept the guardianship, i.e. the rule of the unbelievers. Muslims believe the Quran is the word of God and the Quran says, “We made you an exalted nation, that you may be guardians over the people” (2:143). The only status that is acceptable to Muslims is that they should rule over others while others are reduced into dhimmis, second class citizens who would labor and support their Muslim masters.

The third option is really ugly. It consists in doing to Muslims what they do to others, and give them a taste from their own holy book, i.e., “to cast terror in their hearts” (Q. 8:12; 3:151). Treat Muslims the way they treat non-Muslims. If they burn churches, burn their mosques. If they gun down people in kosher supermarkets, gun them down in halal shops. If they massacre the non-Muslims in Iraq, or kill them in Bangladesh, Pakistan or Syria, kill them in UK, France and Germany. Make life unbearable for them, just as they make it unbearable for non-Muslims wherever they are in power. Muslims are still a minority in the west. Once they see their lives is in danger, they will leave on their own accord, just as millions of Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Bahais and Hindus have left their ancestral homelands because Muslims made life unbearable for them. When kept at bay in their own countries, Muslims pose no threat to the world. They will fight among each other and self-destruct. They are a problem only when they migrate to non-Muslims countries and strive to conquer them as their religion requires it from them.

As you see the last two options are really bad and really ugly. But there is one that is even worse. It is to do nothing. If we do nothing, in just a generation, Muslims will become powerful enough to do to us what they do to non-Muslims wherever they are powerful. If we do nothing our grandchildren will suffer the same fate that non-Muslims suffer in Islamic countries, with the difference that there will be nowhere left in the world as safe haven to accept them as refugees.

I am not in favor of mass deportation, and less in favor of casting terror in the hearts of Muslims. I hope to set them free with truth so they can be our friends, instead of our enemy. But the last thing I want is for the entire world to become Islamic State. I rather see Muslims expelled from Europe, America and Australia, even if it means killing a few thousands of them, than billions butchered by them a generation from now. I witnessed Shah’s cowardice when he failed to gun down a few hundred protesters in the Islamic uprising of 1979 and as the result over a million Iranians were killed by the Islamic regime and the country has become a giant prison. So I know a thing or two about pragmatism. If Islam is allowed to win it means the end of human civilization. If Islam wins, humanity will enter a dark age from which it can never emerge.

Let us hope we come to our senses and do the right thing. Let us hope we rescue Muslims from their faith of hate and bring them back to the fold of humanity. But if all fails. Let us pay attention to one of the most profound passages ever written.

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace” (Ecclesiastes 3).

The views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Science, Religion, and Culture or its staff.