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Islam
A. The Terrorist Threat
1. The Terrorist Threat
Osama bin Laden has become a household name, for all the wrong reasons. His organisation holds governments and whole populations in fear – of where and when he is to strike next. But what sort of person is he? The few who have met him have found him a most charming person; likewise other members of al-Qa’eda and related organisations. In the Islamic world many regard him as a good Muslim, the supreme example of devoted adherence to the tenets of original Islam the way Muhammad taught it; and their number is increasing! See further here.
There are several pieces of misinformation about Islam abroad in the community, promoted by both the media and politicians for philosophical and political reasons respectively, which need to be debunked:
1. Islam means “peace”. It does not! It means “submission”. Quite incredibly this misconception has gained a currency, and in the face of all linguistic evidence it continues to be noised around. A Muslim author, writing on behalf of the University of Southern California, puts it this way
It might seem strange to think of this as a misconception, but in fact it is. The root word of Islam is “al-silm” which means “submission” or “surrender”. It is understood to mean “submission to Allah”. In spite of whatever noble intention has caused many a Muslim to claim that Islam is derived primarily from peace, this is not true.
A secondary root of Islam may be “Al-Salaam” (peace), however the text of the Qur'an makes it clear that Allah has clearly intended the focus of this way of life to be submission to Him. This entails submission to Him at all times, in times of peace, war, ease, or difficulty
We can summarise it this way:
The word Islam (“submission”) is derived from the Arabic infinitive Salama. So too is the word Salam (“peace”), and also the verb Salima (“to be saved, to escape from danger”). One of the derivations of the infinitive Salama means “the sting of a snake” or again “the tanning of leather”: does that therefore mean that Islam must be related either to the ‘stinging of the snake’ or ‘tanning the leather’? Hardly! This is yet another example of what is called “the etymological fallacy”, where one purports to elicit a meaning purely from a word’s etymological derivation.
In his battles Muhammad would send letters to leaders of tribes, urging them to surrender to his authority and to believe in him as the messenger of Allah. In so doing he would always end his letters with: "Aslem, Taslam!". While these words are derived from the same infinitive Salama, neither one of them implies the meaning of ‘peace’. The sentence in fact means “surrender and you will be safe”, i.e., “surrender or face death”. This is hardly a message of peace!
(Adapted from:http://www.answering-islam.de/Main/Hoaxes/salamislam.htm)
2. Islam is a peaceful religion. This mantra continues to spread, in the face of both Islam’s militant history and the present jihad across the Western world in particular, the many “purple passages” in the Qur’an (see for example Sura 9) and Hadith (traditions) which advocate violence, and the many Islamic countries in the modern world which actively and aggressively persecute their Christian populations. In the Sudan, for example, the Muslim government of the north has been practising ethnic cleansing of the Christian and Animist south over the last quarter century by rapine, pillage, arson, murder, kidnapping, slave trading, flogging, and torture. A UN Commission no less, verified this in the mid-1990s, but the Western world took little notice, preferring to dismiss it as merely a “civil war”. Across the Muslim world discrimination, violence, forced conformity, intimidation, imprisonment and the like are practised against non-Muslim minorities, especially Christians. Then there are the brutalities of the apostasy laws in Islamic countries: under Shari’a Law anyone who converts to a non-Muslim religion, especially Christianity, incurs the death penalty. There is no freedom not to believe Islam in Islamic countries! The Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Alliance, the Barnabas Fund, the Voice of the Martyrs(1), Voice of the Martyrs,(2), and International Christian Concern are all involved in monitoring these activities (click on these for links). See also the many papers on AnsweringIslam.
3. Islam does not seek to take over Western Countries. On this pretext Western nations have accepted large numbers of immigrants from Muslim lands, such that now Muslim sectors of the population, although still technically in the minority, agitate for Shari’a law to prevail in their constituencies. This was stated unequivocally in a meeting for Muslims in the evening of 2nd June, 2006, at the University of Melbourne, whose theme was “Islam in Australia: the Next Ten Years”. There one of the four speakers, the imam Abu Hamza, declared his hope and intention for the whole of Australia to be under Islam and Islamic law within that period. In Birmingham, England, for example, the Muslim council or “Parliament” pushed for Shari’a law to be enforced for that city. In Hume, a city within metropolitan Melbourne, a sizeable sector (12%) is Muslim and has a Muslim mayor, and whose council forbids a church to have a notice board advertising their services. In Victoria, Australia, we now have the “Racial and Religious Tolerance” Act, one which has enjoyed strong Muslim support. The way the Islamic Council of Victoria has exploited this law since it was passed, notoriously in the “Two Dannys” case, reveals it as a de facto anti-blasphemy law, similar to what prevails in overtly Muslim countries. Similar legislation has been proposed for Britain, the U.S.A., and elsewhere.
If this Victorian legislation is not a de facto anti-blasphemy law it is certainly that of a dhimmi-law. This term in Islamic law covers non-Muslims given an exempt but inferior status in Muslim countries. Under it dhimmis must pay a jizya or tax and thus enjoy protection from jihad, but may not in any way criticise or speak against Islam. In many other ways they are second or even third class citizens in those countries. However, if they violate these conditions they will again be subjected to war against their group.
Islamic Jihadists see the present push into the West as the “Third Jihad”. The first two, in the seventh century, and then in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, were by military confrontation, but both ultimately failed. Now they seek to achieve the same goal by peaceful infiltration. A good discussion of this can be found in Insider Report, hosted by Larry Abrahams.
2. Religious Liberty
While persecution for religious belief is well documented for Islamic and Communist countries there is a growing trend of repression in Western countries where religious liberty has been a fact of life for a long time, especially in English-speaking countries. The number of incidents is growing, and they are outlined and documented in:
Janet L. Folger, The Criminalization of Christianity, Multnomah, 2005, 276pp.
What is behind this? Elizabeth Kendal of the Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Alliance perceptively puts it thus
Most Western governments are honourably keen to advance equal rights for all. But they are unwilling to face the fact that the "rights" of different cultures sometimes conflict. On top of this, they are so committed to secularism and appeasement that they can do nothing else other than advance the myth that all moral values (in the absence of moral absolutes) are essentially equal and good. They refuse to accept the fact that many Islamic laws and customs actually violate the laws of the land and the constitutional rights of citizens. They tolerate, and even advance, intolerance at the behest of pressure groups because that is preferable to, and easier than, imposing moral standards for the benefit of all citizens, including voiceless minorities (eg apostates and Muslim women).
This raises the point that secularism cannot defend freedom, because it has jettisoned the very basis of freedom, viz. law founded on Divine Law. It has abandoned the absolutes of the Judaeo-Christian framework for the notion that “free choice” for the individual is the highest good, with equal rights for all. However, secularism has no formula for the resolution of rights: “Free choice” for what? How does one arbitrate conflicting “rights”? Hence “free choice” really means in practice an all-out “free for all”, where the winners are the strong and strident, while others are suppressed. As Max Cooray of Macquarie University observed many years ago, “A right-conscious society [as opposed to a duty-oriented one] in effect recognises a few rights, …those demanded by the powerful, the aggressive, and the nasty.” (Letter to The Australian, 14.3.1990, p.12)
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