Tag Archives: Radical Islam

Polemics

Nabeel Qureshi: the Quran inspires radical Muslims to commit Islamic terrorism

1 Comment

Dr. Nabeel Qureshi, a former Muslim, explains which verses of the Qu’ran are linked to Islamic terrorism in a USA Today editorial.

Excerpt:

As a Muslim growing up in the United States, I was taught by my imams and the community around me that Islam is a religion of peace. My family modeled love for others and love for country, and not just by their words. My father served in the U.S. Navy throughout my childhood, starting as a seaman and retiring as a lieutenant commander. I believed wholeheartedly a slogan often repeated at my mosque after 9/11: “The terrorists who hijacked the planes also hijacked Islam.”

Yet as I began to investigate the Quran and the traditions of Muhammad’s life for myself in college, I found to my genuine surprise that the pages of Islamic history are filled with violence. How could I reconcile this with what I had always been taught about Islam?

[…]The Quran itself reveals a trajectory of jihad reflected in the almost 23 years of Muhammad’s prophetic career. As I demonstrate carefully in my book, Answering Jihad: A Better Way Forward, starting with peaceful teachings and proclamations of monotheism, Muhammad’s message featured violence with increasing intensity, culminating in surah 9, chronologically the last major chapter of the Quran, and its most expansively violent teaching. Throughout history, Muslim theologians have understood and taught this progression, that the message of the Quran culminates in its ninth chapter.

Surah 9 is a command to disavow all treaties with polytheists and to subjugate Jews and Christians (9.29) so that Islam may “prevail over all religions” (9.33). It is fair to wonder whether any non-Muslims in the world are immune from being attacked, subdued or assimilated under this command. Muslims must fight, according to this final chapter of the Quran, and if they do not, then their faith is called into question and they are counted among the hypocrites (9.44-45). If they do fight, they are promised one of two rewards, either spoils of war or heaven through martyrdom. Allah has made a bargain with the mujahid who obeys: Kill or be killed in battle, and paradise awaits (9.111).

Muslim thought leaders agree that the Quran promotes such violence. Maajid Nawaz, co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation in the United Kingdom, has said, “We Muslims must admit there are challenging Koranic passages that require reinterpretation today. … Only by rejecting vacuous literalism are we able to condemn, in principle, ISIS-style slavery, beheading, lashing, amputation & other medieval practices forever (all of which are in the Quran). … Reformers either win, and get religion-neutral politics, or lose, and get ISIL-style theocracy.” In other words, Muslims must depart from the literal reading of the Quran in order to create a jihad-free Islamic world.

This is not at all to say that most Muslims are violent. The vast majority of Muslims do not live their lives based on chapter 9 of the Quran or on the books of jihad in the hadith. My point is not to question the faith of such Muslims nor to imply that radical Muslims are the true Muslims. Rather, I simply want to make clear that while ISIL may lure youth through a variety of methods, it radicalizes them primarily by urging them to follow the literal teachings of the Quran and the hadith, interpreted consistently and in light of the violent trajectory of early Islam. As long as the Islamic world focuses on its foundational texts, we will continue to see violent jihadi movements.

So, any attempt to engage with Muslims will require us to address the texts that they appeal to when they justify their actions. Both Republicans and Democrats try to gloss over the specific passages of the Qu’ran which are troublesome. They claim that Islam, interpreted literally, is a religion of Peace. And they claim that distorting the words of the Qu’ran results in a Jihadi ideology. That’s not accurate. It’s not distortion of the Qu-ran that is causing the problems, it’s taking those passages literally.

There are troubling passages in the Bible, as well, where God is in a theocratic relationship with the Jewish people and commands them to attack their enemies. But the difference is that those verses are not effective in the present day, for present day Christians. Christians are under a new Covenant with a new High Priest, Jesus. This new covenant tells Christians to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. Are moderate Muslim scholars and Western politicians ready to face the real challenge?

News

The 5 Taliban commanders that Obama traded for a deserter have returned to the Taliban

4 Comments
Private Bowe Bergdahl pled guilty to mischief and desertion
Private Bowe Bergdahl pled guilty to charges of mischief and desertion

We live in a world where people get their news by watching far-left news media. They’re sure that Obama did a great job, but they can’t remember exactly what he did that was so great. When Obama asserts that he led a “scandal-free” administration, they just nod their heads like trained seals. They can’t remember any of Obama’s scandals.

One such scandal is Obama’s decision to trade five senior Taliban commanders – who were captured on the battlefield – for a Private for walked off his post (deserted) in Afghanistan. He abandoned his brothers in a combat zone. Perpetual liar Susan Rice – who falsely blamed the Benghazi terrorist attack on a YouTube video – claimed that Bergdahl was a hero who had “served honorably”. It was only later that Bergdahl was charged with mischief and treason. And he pleaded guilty to those charges. It should be noted that he isn’t just a “deserter”. He put down his weapons and took off his uniform and sought refuge with enemy forces. He’s not just a deserter, he’s a traitor. Exactly the kind of person who Democrats admire.

Did Bergdahl’s desertion have any consequences for his brothers in the military? Yes. When his absence was discovered, ground and air assets were diverted from their missions in order to search for him, to “rescue” him. Not just a few assets, but a huge number of assets were diverted to searching for him. U.S. troops lost their lives searching for him. Some were maimed and injured searching for him. And what’s more, if you’ve read the book “Red Platoon”, you know that other operations were impacted. Men were killed in Eastern Afghanistan at the Battle of Keating, because their close air support assets were re-tasked with searching for Bergdahl.

At the time of the trade, Obama promised that these five Taliban commanders would never again attack U.S. Armed Forces on the battlefield. That was how he justified the trade.

Time magazine reported:

When U.S. President Barack Obama agreed in May to exchange five Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay for Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier who had been held captive for five years, his political opponents had a field day. They warned that the detainees risked returning to Afghanistan, and to militancy. Obama, with the backing of the government of Qatar that had agreed to host the men, promised that they would be kept far from the battlefield.

Here is the latest news from the Washington Free Beacon:

The five members of the Afghan Taliban who were released from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for captured American Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in 2014 have joined the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, according the insurgent group’s spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid.

[…]”The Taliban are bringing back their old generation, which means the Taliban have not changed their thinking or their leadership,” said Haroun Mir, a political analyst in Kabul. “What we are more worried about is if tomorrow the Taliban say ‘we are ready to negotiate,’ who will represent Kabul? That is the big challenge because the government is so divided, not just ideologically but on ethnic lines.”

[…]President Barack Obama received backlash in 2014 when his administration orchestrated the prisoner swap for Bergdahl, prompting him to defend his decision.

The Obama administration favored our enemies at the expense of our own armed forces in so many ways.

They rewarded convicted traitor Private Bradley Manning with a pardon for his treason, and a free sex change – paid for by taxpayers. He leaked so many military secrets to our enemies, but the Obama administration had to protect him from his punishment, because they agreed with what he did. Later on, he would run as a Democrat, because that’s what he is.

The Obama administration forced many policies on the military that were designed to reduce our effectiveness. Sometimes, it was overt, like canceling the deal to help Poland with missile defense. Or backing out of Syria in order to hand it to the Russians. Or give Iran a green light and $400 million dollars to research nuclear weapons. Or forcing the U.S. Navy to use green energy. The list goes on and on. I personally know people who left the military because of the Obama administration’s anti-military policies.

And it’s not just the armed forces, it’s our spies and diplomats. Instead of pushing an agenda of world peace, the State Department antagonized other nations by pushing for legalized abortion and same-sex marriage. Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, was allowed to operate a private, unsecure e-mail server in her bathroom. She sent and received classified e-mails over that server. And we know know that the server was hacked by the Chinese.

During the Obama administration, our allies were continuously disappointed. Our enemies were continuously emboldened. The Democrats did not take the job of protecting taxpayers seriously. No one who cares about projecting American strength and values abroad should ever vote for the Democrat party.

News

Obama administration ignored pro-democracy protesters, gave Iran dictators $1.7 billion

1 Comment
Neda Agha-Soltan - pro-democracy protester who was killed by Iradian dictatorship
Neda Agha-Soltan – pro-democracy protester who was killed by Iradian dictatorship

Since we are seeing Trump reach out to pro-democracy protesters in Iran, it’s worth remembering how Obama responded to them in 2009.

First, here’s what happened in Iran in 2009, just after Obama was elected president.

The radically leftist BBC reports:

The doctor who tried to save an Iranian protester as she bled to death on a street in Tehran has told the BBC of her final moments.

Dr Arash Hejazi, who is studying at a university in the south of England, said he ran to Neda Agha-Soltan’s aid after seeing she had been shot in the chest.

Despite his attempts to stop the bleeding she died in less than a minute, he said.

Video of Ms Soltan’s death was posted on the internet and images of her have become a rallying point for Iranian opposition supporters around the world.

[…]Dr Hejazi said he saw Ms Soltan, who he did not know, with an older man who he thought was her father but later on learned was her music teacher.

“Suddenly everything turned crazy. The police threw teargas and the motorcycles started rushing towards the crowd. We ran to an intersection and people were just standing. They didn’t know what to do.

“We heard a gunshot. Neda was standing one metre away from me. I turned back and I saw blood gushing out of Neda’s chest.

“She was in a shocked situation, just looking at her chest. Then she lost her control.

“We ran to her and lay her on the ground. I saw the bullet wound just below the neck with blood gushing out.

“I have never seen such a thing because the bullet, it seemed to have blasted inside her chest, and later on, blood exiting from her mouth and nose.

“I had the impression that it had hit the lung as well. Her blood was draining out of her body and I was just putting pressure on the wound to try to stop the bleeding, which wasn’t successful unfortunately, and she died in less than one minute.”

Here’s the video:

Here’s how Obama responded to the pro-democracy protesters in 2009, according to the far-left extremist New York Times:

President Obama said Tuesday that it would be counterproductive for the United States “to be seen as meddling” in the disputed Iranian presidential election, dismissing criticism from several leading Republicans that he has failed to speak out forcefully enough on behalf of the Iranian opposition.

[…]With protesters filling the streets of Tehran to denounce the declared outcome of the election, administration officials said they were wary of doing anything that would allow the declared victor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to portray the protests as American-led.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, offered some of the sharpest critiques of Mr. Obama’s tempered response.

“He should speak out that this is a corrupt, flawed sham of an election,” Mr. McCain said in an interview Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show. “The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights.”

The UK Telegraph explains that this was not a free and fair election:

Iran has seen thousands demonstrate following the election, prompting the regime to respond to public anger on Tuesday by offering a partial recount of votes in last week’s election.

Supporters of both men have staged demonstrations, each drawing tens of thousands of people, but the event in support of the president was heavily promoted on state television, with all six channels urging Iranians to attend.

The rival protest, by contrast, was officially banned and the regime tried to stop its opponents from communicating by blocking text messages and email accounts.

Later on in his failed presidency, Obama would send $1.7 billion in cash to Iran to help them develop nuclear weapons, so they could destroy Israel a little faster. He made sure to include $400 million in unmarked bills, so that future administrations would not be able to back out of the “deal”.

It came out recently that Obama was so desperate to give the Iranian regime this money, that he actually stopped an investigation into drug-smuggling by Iran’s terrorist ally, Hezbollah.

The Stream reports on the story, which was broken by the far-left Politico:

President Barack Obama torpedoed a DEA-led effort to stop Hezbollah from smuggling cocaine into the country. POLITICO broke the bombshell news Sunday night. The reason for allowing the Iran-backed terror group’s criminal enterprise to continue? Obama’s desperate desire for better relations and a nuclear deal with Iran.

The DEA teamed with dozens of agencies here and abroad in 2008 after discovering Hezbollah had grown beyond Middle East politics and thuggery into international crime. The special task force was called Project Cassandra. For eight years Project Cassandra worked to unravel Hezbollah’s drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa.

Hezbollah isn’t just smuggling cocaine. A November piece in The Hill noted, “Hezbollah’s involvement in producing and selling counterfeit medicines such as Captagon — a powerful amphetamine — is well documented.” Captagon is dubbed “chemical courage.” It was the drug of choice for ISIS. As Canada’s CBC reported, Captagon is “widely used by fighters in the Syrian civil war for its ability to make people alert, fearless and ready to kill with abandon.”

Project Cassandra traced the crime syndicate to “the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.”

This is the same Iran that imprisons Christian women in dirty prisons, funds Hezbollah terrorists, sends aid to Islamic terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, and backed the corrupt Syria dictatorship. And more. I don’t have space to write all of what they do, but they’re one of the worst countries on the face of the planet. Not the people – but the Islamist dictators who run the show.

Trump came out and expressed support for the Iranian protesters, for which he received widespread support from lawmakers and former government officials.

Right now, half of the American public is so ignorant of national security and foreign policy that we elected an imbecile to the White House in 2008 and 2012. The idiots elected an idiot, and it was a disastrous eight years for liberty and peace. All I can say right now about Iran is at least the bleeding has stopped now that the grown-ups are back in charge.