The Myth of Islam Busted
Review of The Myth of Islamic Tolerance. How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims, ed. Robert Spencer.
by Bruce Thornton
Private Papers
One of the greatest impediments in our war against jihadist terrorism is the misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies about Islam entertained by many of our public intellectuals. Examples are easy to find; here's one from the otherwise intelligent Gregg Easterbrook, Atlantic Monthly contributor and senior editor at The New Republic, from his recent book The Progress Paradox: “Most Muslims are good-hearted, peace-loving people, just as are most Christians and Jews. A small minority of Muslims are vicious fanatics. But then the Christian ethos has spawned its share of hideous killers, among them the terrorist Timothy McVeigh, and this tells us nothing about the typical Christian.” The obviously false analogy in the last sentence — McVeigh didn't kill with the sanction of Christian theology or belief, which has no doctrine remotely close to jihad, and millions of Christians didn't dance in the streets after the bombing in Oklahoma City — could stand as a textbook example of this logical fallacy.

Such ignorance — on display everywhere in the media, especially among those eager to rationalize away the Islamic roots of the latest terrorist murder — makes a book like The Myth of Islamic Tolerance particularly important. Robert Spencer, in earlier books like Islam Unveiled, Onward Muslim Soldiers, and the recent The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades, as well as on his invaluable website Jihad Watch (jihadwatch.org), has already done yeoman's work in documenting Islam's fundamental intolerance, martial aggressiveness, and sanctioning of violence against non-Muslim infidels. The 58 essays in the current book attack root and branch the widespread Orwellian myth, recently given cinematic sanction in Kingdom of Heaven, that Islamic societies have been historically more tolerant and friendly to minorities than has been Western culture.

Spencer sets the stage with an overview of the myth, its political uses, and its refutation by the simple facts of history and Islamic jurisprudence and theology. Politically, the myth provides psychic comfort for jaded Westerners, especially Europeans, who have made the devil's bargain to accept large numbers of Islamic immigrants as a source of cheap labor: “European states eyeing the rapid growth of their Muslim populations console themselves with tales of old al-Andalus, reassuring one another that Islamic hegemony not only wasn't all that bad — it was a veritable golden age.” Thus European and American politicians cater to Islamic immigrants, whom they believe will assimilate into Western society, their “tolerant” and “peace-loving” religion merely enriching the multi-ethnic tapestry.

But as Spencer points out, and as history and Islamic doctrine show repeatedly, “Islam doesn't accept a position as just one among a community of disparate religions but must struggle to make itself supreme.” Unable to prosecute militarily the divine mandate to expand the House of Islam until it encompasses the whole world, modern jihadists have been adept at manipulating the various cultural pathologies of the West. As Ibn Warraq points out in his Foreword, the old myth of the “noble savage,” the habit of idealizing more primitive or alien non-Western cultures in order to castigate one's own, has from the beginning of Western contact with Islam distorted the understanding of it. Later, Great Power geopolitical contests reinforced these European idealizations of Islamic societies, particularly the Ottoman Turks. The result has been centuries of mythic idealizations that continue to obscure the true nature of Islam, leading to the strange phenomenon we see nearly every day: non-Muslim Westerners “hastening,” as Spencer puts it, “to assure the public that the Islam of the terrorists is not the 'true Islam,' which is, they maintain, a benign and tolerant thing.”

Eager to display their sensitivity to and tolerance of the cultural “other,” apologists like those Spencer liberally quotes end up arrogantly asserting that millions of practicing Muslims don't understand their own religion. But of course the jihadists know what their religion teaches about non-Muslims: they are categorically inferior infidels, particularly the “People of the Book,” Jews and Christians, “renegades who have rejected this final revelation [of Muhammad] out of corruption and malice and who have exchanged truth for falsehood.” They are accursed, and as such, it is the duty of every Muslim “to fight them,” in the words of the Qur'an, “until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah.” In a later verse this injunction is specifically directed against Jews and Christians: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya [a special tax on non-Muslims] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

As for those fantasies of intercultural harmony entertained by many Western multiculturalists, consider this verse from the Qur'an: “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors. They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turn to them (for friendship) is of them.” As Spencer reminds us, “This is the Qur'an that pious Muslims cherish and memorize in its entirety; it is for them their primary guide to understanding how they should make their way in the world and deal with other people. It is nothing short of staggering that the myth of Islamic tolerance could have gained such currency in the teeth of the Qur'an's open contempt and hatred for Jews and Christians and incitements to violence against them.” Spencer's survey of the Hadith, the words and deeds attributed to Muhammed and second in authority to the Qur'an; the interpretations of the Hadith and Qur'an by centuries of Islamic jurisprudence; and the writings of modern Islamic radicals like Sayyid Qutb, the premier theorist of modern jihad, testifies to a consistent tradition of intolerance towards non-Muslims and the divine sanction to subdue them to Islam.

The subsequent essays in The Myth of Islamic Tolerance elaborate with precise detail the more specific consequences of Islamic doctrine for religious minorities living in Muslim countries. All are valuable and repay careful reading; the Herculean efforts of David G. Littman over the years to force the United Nations to acknowledge the abuse of non-Muslims' human rights in Islamic nations should be more widely known and acknowledged. As important as these documents are, the 18 essays and presentations by historian Bat Ye'or offer the most exhaustive and meticulous documentation of Islamic intolerance and oppression of “dhimmi,” those non-Muslims subjected not just to a tax (the “jizya”) but to institutionalized oppression and humiliation, a whole host of repressive restrictions covering dress, public behavior, and the practice of their religion. The particulars of dhimmitude as documented by Bat Ye'or are strikingly similar to the Jim Crow laws in the segregated South, and served a similar purpose: to remind Jews and Christians every day of their inferiority to Muslims, and to reinforce the dhimmi's precarious position, since the “covenant” by which Muslims allowed the dhimmi to keep their lives could be revoked at any time, whereupon the dhimmi could be justly plundered and slaughtered.

As well as documenting this practice in Islamic history and jurisprudence, Bat Ye'or's essays also detail how the dynamic of dhimmitude continues to inform relations between Europe and Islam today, as seen particularly in the scapegoating and marginalization of Israel, the one nation comprising former dhimmi who have shaken off their inferior status and thus challenged the Islamic confidence in its own divinely sanctioned superiority: “Israel's struggle is none other than a fight to destroy a dhimmi archetype that has bewitched the Arab consciousness with a destructive and nostalgic dream of hegemony, irreconcilable with principles of decolonization or with the rights and liberties of peoples.”

Indeed, the myth of Islamic tolerance is itself an expression of the dhimmi mentality already characterizing many Westerners, their acceptance of their culture's crimes and inferiority codified in multiculturalism and currently facilitating jihadist terrorism. In this regard the late Edward Said's Orientalism stands as one of the most pernicious and influential peddlers of virulent anti-Westernism, in this instance one tarted up in the sort of postmodern jargon that impresses badly educated humanities professors. Said was the consummate academic hustler, a Westernized Egyptian child of privilege who invented a Palestinian refugee persona that gratified the American university's insatiable appetite for oppressed victims “of color” (see the article by Justus Reid Weiner in the September 1999 issue of Commentary). The logical, historical, and philosophical sins of Orientalism have been noted by Bernard Lewis (reprinted in Islam and the West) and Keith Windschuttle (New Criterion, January 1999), and to this list should be added Ibn Warraq's devastating critique. Warraq is the brave author of Why I Am Not a Muslim, a devastating exposure of Islam's intolerant and illiberal principles and practices. His careful demolition of Said's dishonest and intellectually incoherent book is alone worth the price of The Myth of Islamic Tolerance.

For as Warraq makes clear, Said's book has indirectly sanctioned Islamic terrorism by giving an apparent scholarly justification for blaming the problems of the Middle East on Western colonial and imperial sins rather than on flaws in Islam and Arab regimes, the social, cultural, economic, and religious dysfunctions that prevent them from accommodating themselves to the modern world. And it has reinforced among many American intellectuals the bad habit of cultural self-loathing that leeches away moral support for any action that would defend America's interests and security. Finally, Orientalism has contributed to the corruption of Middle Eastern studies in the West as manifested in the politically and ideologically skewed “scholarship” that has obscured the truth of Islam, a sampling of which can be read in Daniel Pipes's “Jihad and the Professors,” another gem reprinted in Spencer's book. As Warraq concludes, “Said has much to answer for.”

The eagerness of Western intellectuals to betray their professional duty to seek truth, and their zeal for idealizing a culture which wouldn't tolerate their existence for five seconds, are both from the perspective of the jihadists evidence that the West is a spiritually bankrupt dhimmi culture ripe for submission to Islamic hegemony. Unfortunately, too many of our leaders who otherwise understand the nature of the enemy endorse many of the same myths exploded in this indispensable volume; just listen to one of Tony Blair's closest aides, in a 2004 report on counter-terrorism: Britain's strategy should be “to prevent terrorism by tackling its underlying causes, to work together to resolve regional conflicts to support moderate Islam and reform and to diminish support for terrorists by influencing relevant social and economic issues.” Meanwhile government-subsidized mosques were preaching jihad and creating the bombers who murdered over 50 Londoners. If we are to prevail in the struggle against jihad, we must first acknowledge the truth about the enemy and his motivations. The Myth of Islamic Tolerance is a good place to start.



http://www.victorhanson.com/articles...ton080605.html

See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1304 Tolerance and Pluralism: Muslim clerics want curbs on conversions

See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1261 Tolerance and Pluralism: Muslim converts to Christianity face persecution and death in Bangladesh


See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1168
Are Arab Christians becoming extinct?

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1146
Burma: Christian Genocide

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1112
Imperialism and Colonialism: "Jihad is the murdering
of Christians and Jews"

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1052
Tolerance and Pluralism: Riot breaks out over opening
of church in Turkey

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/1015
Doctor killed by Islamic Terrorists for converting to
Christianity

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/995
Tolerance and Pluralism: Why Must Ex-Muslims Live in
Fear -- In America?

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/972
Malaysia's Muslims have 'no way out'

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/924
"All we did was fall in love and get married."

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/856
Campaigners take "apostasy rights" bid to U.N

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/816
Tolerance and pluralism: Gunmen kill priest, wound
four others in Indonesia

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/810
Christians and Jews Demonized in Saudi Textbooks

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/804
Muslims sliced off the nose, ears and tongue of a
14-year-old girl

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/771
Tolerance and Pluralism in Islam? Afghan's throat cut
for being Christian

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/684
Bangladeshi terrorists call for Jaziya (religious tax)
on non-Muslims

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/674
Mobs vandalise at least two churches near Jakarta

See also:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/632
Christian beaten to death in hospital by Muslim cop

See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/499 Tolerance and pluralism?: Christian Girl Whipped for Not Wearing Headscarf

See also: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism/message/425 Islam, Apostasy, and Human Rights

Have you met Tim33? You two should get along great.
Dono

__________________
That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
– Theodore Roosevelt

Maybe the "illuminati" tim33 spoke of are in one and the same with this shadowy "muslims" organisation, who ever they are.

__________________
There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier.

Rather than actually debate any points of the article, you engage in - what I am going to guess - ad hominem attacks. Is there anything in this article that you wish to refute or correct?

Well, the article itself is hard to take seriously.

EVERY religion holds itself to be the absolute truth and and defines its own absolute values. logical consequence is that other religions and beliefs are treated as false and inferior, while other religions' values, insofar as they differ from the "home" values are considered a sign of immorality.

Most christians consider many parts of the Bible as obsolete, applying to different times. Like the ones about eating and using pork, slavery and inferiority of women. The same applies to Islam.

Most of the world's population is composed of moderates. The guys who silently believe in their own beliefs and leave it to god to sort out the mess after their death. These people don't want to blow themselves up, but want to live as well as possible and help their children do the same while being left in peace.

Moral equivocation. You are taking the parochial view that Islam is like Christianity and other faiths.

Where did you hear that the same applies to Islam? In fact, if a Muslim denies Shariah, he is branded a heretic and apostate. The punishment for apostacy in Islam is death. Look at the historical record. Where Muslims are the minority population, they are "tolerant" of other forms of government. However, when Muslims become the majority population, this "tolerance" evaporates.

Josef Said
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/khilafism

For a display of Christian intolerance, see any post here by Easyrider.

__________________
He or she who supports a State organized in a military way – whether directly or indirectly – participates in sin. Each man takes part in the sin by contributing to the maintenance of the State by paying taxes.

~ Gandhi

Bad guess, if I ever attack you, you will not have to guess. There is an axiom, "Birds of a feather flock together", and I thought you might want to flock around with tim33.
No, I have my own little anti-troll procedure, if a first post is very long and does not have my name in the first sentence, I usually ignore it. In your case, I extended the courtesy of introducing you to tim33. I think you two will be compatible and will make a cute couple.
Dono

__________________
That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
– Theodore Roosevelt

I guess the old days of intro or yelling "Yo! Camp!" is dead and gone, Dono...
But, it would be polite if they did instead of pouring out these long first-posts, which I agree, is indicative of trollishness.

__________________
Ron

It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it. --- A. A. Hodge

In this particular point, yes. They all consider themselves as absolute truths, which results in effects stated above.

As for the rest of the argument, take a look at some of the darker passages of the bible and some of the darker interpretations of them, and you'll see that they are not very different...