Eliminate Israel, Eliminate Islamic Terrorism?
03/02/2018 by Raymond Ibrahim
from Front Page Magazine
The plague of Islamic
terrorism is based on “grievances” against Israel—so says Al Azhar, the world’s
most prestigious madrasa (or Muslim “university”) that co-hosted Barrack
Obama’s 2009 “A New Beginning” speech. During a recently televised
Egyptian interview, Ahmed Al Tayeb—Al Azhar’s grand imam (pictured below), once named the “most influential Muslim in the world”—said:
I have noticed that
they are always telling us that terrorism is Islamic. All those mouthpieces
that croak—out of ignorance or because they were told to—that the Al-Azhar
curricula are the cause of terrorism never talk about Israel, about Israel’s
prisons, about the genocides perpetrated by the Zionist entity state…. If
not for the abuse of the region by means of the Zionist entity, there would
never have been any problem. The Middle East and the region would have
progressed, and the Arab individual would have been like any other person in
the world, enjoying a good life, or at least enjoying the right to live in
peace.
There’s certainly
much to comment on here. First, Al Azhar has in fact been exposed time and timeagain teaching the same “anti-infidel” and
supremacist doctrines that groups like the Islamic State rely on. After
being asked why Al Azhar, which is in the habit of denouncing secular thinkers
as un-Islamic, refuses to denounce the Islamic State as un-Islamic,
Sheikh Nasr, a scholar of Islamic law and graduate of Al Azhar, said:
It can’t [condemn
the Islamic State as un-Islamic]. The Islamic State is a byproduct of Al
Azhar’s programs. So can Al Azhar denounce itself as un-Islamic? Al
Azhar says there must be a caliphate and that it is an obligation for the Muslim
world [to establish it]. Al Azhar teaches the law of apostasy and killing
the apostate. Al Azhar is hostile towards religious minorities, and
teaches things like not building churches, etc. Al Azhar upholds the
institution of jizya [extracting tribute from religious minorities]. Al
Azhar teaches stoning people. So can Al Azhar denounce itself as
un-Islamic?
But what of Tayeb’s
other point, that because Israel “abuses” Palestinians (meaning fellow
Muslims), aggrieved Muslims around the world have had no choice but to turn to
jihad/terrorism? This of course is another rehashing of the “Muslim grievance”
myth popularized by al-Qaeda post 9/11. Back in 2009, Bin
Laden said:
You [Americans]
should ask yourselves whether your security, your blood, your sons, your money,
your jobs, your homes, your economy, and your reputation are more dear to you
than the security and economy of the Israelis…. Let me say that we have
declared many times, over more than two and a half decades, that the
reason for our conflict with you is your support for your Israeli allies,
who are occupying our land of Palestine [emphasis added].
Needless to say, this
message was (and continues to be) swallowed hook line and sinker by many Western analysts—even as bin Laden was
stressing to fellow Muslims (in Arabic) the “real reason for our conflict”:
Our talks with the
infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve
around one issue — one that demands our total support, with power and
determination, with one voice — and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force
people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not
spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: [1] either
willing submission [conversion]; [2] or payment of the jizya, through physical,
though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; [3] or the sword —
for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live. The matter is summed up for
every person alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or
die [The Al Qaeda
Reader, p. 42].
More emboldened
jihadis have of late dropped the façade. In an article unambiguously
titled, “Why We Hate You & Why We Fight You,” the
Islamic State confessed that “We hate you, first and foremost, because you are
disbelievers.” As for any and all political “grievances,” these are
“secondary” reasons for the jihad:
What’s important to
understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies
are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you
is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. […] The
fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us,
vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our
primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.
Even if you were to pay jizyah and
live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate
you [emphasis added].
This threefold
choice, then—conversion, subjugation/jizya, or the sword—is the ultimate source
of conflict between Islam and everyone else; it’s why prudent non-Muslims have
always found the question of achieving permanent peace with the Islamic world
an unsolvable problem. As professor of law James Lorimer (1818-90) wrote over a
century ago:
So long as Islam
endures, the reconciliation of its adherents, even with Jews and Christians
[“People of the Book”], and still more with the rest of mankind, must continue
to be an insoluble problem. … For an indefinite future, however reluctantly, we
must confine our political recognition to the professors of those religions
which … preach the doctrine of “live and let live” (The Institutes
of the Law of Nations, p. 124).
In other words,
political recognition—with all the attendant negotiations, diplomacy, and
concessions that come with it—should be granted to all
religions/civilizations except Islam, which does not reciprocate
nor recognize the notion of “live and let live” (as evinced for example by the
Koran’s commands for Muslims to “enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong”
(e.g., 3:110)—that is, enforce Sharia upon earth).
Nor is Islamic
supremacism confined to doctrines and scriptures that are “open to
interpretation”; history makes an equally ironclad case. As I document in
my forthcoming book, Sword and
Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West,
Muslims, through countless jihads, invaded and eventually conquered some ¾ of
all Christian lands; the scale of destruction and atrocities accompanying these
jihads make Islamic State atrocities seem like child’s play.
If Israel had nothing
to do with all this—it did not even exist—are we really to believe that
grievances against it are responsible for Al Azhar still teaching, and Muslims
still upholding, the same doctrines that caused them to terrorize all
non-Muslims for centuries? No, this is yet
another case of Muslim apologists trying to kill two birds with one stone:
portraying—and thus exonerating—Islamic terrorism as inevitable,
grievance-based reactions to Israel, which deserves all blame. In
reality, the ultimate “grievance” Muslims have
against all non-Muslims is just that—that they are non-Muslim,
inferior infidels that must be subjugated one way or the other.
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