Dr. Paul L. Williams
Islam: The War That Won’t Go Away
June 1, 2009

We are engaged in a war.

It is a very old war - - a war that began when the Prophet Muhammad delivered these final instructions to his followers.: “Know that every Muslim is a Muslim’s brother, and that the Muslims are brethren; fighting between them should be avoided, and the bloodshed in pagan times should not be avenged; Muslims should fight all other men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’

By 635, three years after the Prophet’s death, the Muslim horde had invaded the Byzantine Empire and conquered Damascus, the city where St. Paul was headed when he received a blinding vision of the Resurrected Christ. Antioch, the ancient Greek city where the followers of Christ were first called Christians, fell next. In 636, the Muslims conquered the Christian city of Jerusalem. The caliph Umar stood in triumph over the site of Solomon’s Temple, where the Prophet Muhammad, according to Islamic tradition, once ascended into Paradise.

By 642, the Muslims had swept through the Fertile Crescent, including Syria and Persia (modern day Iraq), slaughtered the Egyptian armies, and spread throughout North Africa. Over 250 Christian churches were destroyed in Egypt. The blood-lust of the Muslims remained unabated even when they encountered little or no resistance.

The conquered Christians and Jews became reduced to the status of dhimmitude. As dhimmis, Christians and Jews were required the pay the obligatory jizyah – suppression tax – which was often so exacting that many converted to Islam rather than pay it. Dhimmis also were compelled to submit to the following disabilities:

Dhimmis are not to build any new places of worship.

Dhimmis are not to repair any old places of worship which have been destroyed by the Muslims.

Dhimmis are not to prevent Muslim travelers from staying in their places of worship.

Dhimmis are to entertain for three days any Muslim who wants to stay in their homes, and for a longer period if a Muslim falls ill,

Dhimmis are not allowed to harbor any hostility towards the Islamic state, or give any aid or comfort to hostile elements.

Dhimmis are not to prevent anyone  - - not even a family member or fellow dhimmi - - from converting to Islam.

Dhimmis are to show respect to every Muslim.

Dhimmis must allow Muslims to participate in their private meetings.

Dhimmis must not dress like Muslims.

Dhimmis are not to name themselves with Muslim names.

Dhimmis are forbidden to ride horses with saddle and bride.

Dhimmis are forbidden to bear arms.

Dhimmis must not wear signet rings or seals on their fingers.

Dhimmis must not sell or drink liquor.

Dhimmis must wear distinctive dress which displays their inferior status and which separates them from true believers.

Dhimmis must not propagate their customs among Muslims.

Dhimmis must not build their houses in the neighborhood of Muslims.

Dhimmis must not bring their dead near the graveyards of Muslims.

Dhimmis are not to observe their religious practices publicly or mourn their dead loudly.

 

By 732, the Islamic horde had conquered Crete, Cyprus and Rhodes; pushed on to overrun Spain; and crossed the Pyrenees into France, where Charles Martel, “the Hammer of the Franks,” managed to force them into retreat at the Battle of Tours. Regarding this battle, Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote at the end of the 18th Century:

A victorious line of march had been prolonged by the Muslim invaders above a thousand miles from the Rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire: the repetition of equal space would have carried the Muslims to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Qu’ran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad.

The Muslims continued to dominate the Iberian Peninsula for the next seven hundred and fifty years. Held in check by the West, the Muslim army continued to sweep east, conquering Syria, northwest India, the Sindh and Punjab regions of modern Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkistan, Java, Borneo, and eventually the Philippines.

Because the Muslims considered Hindus pagans who were not entitled to the rights of the dhimmis, they treated them with a brutality that remains unmatched in the annals of human history. The historian Sita Ram Goel records that the Muslim invaders of India paid no respect to the codes of warfare that had been established for centuries:

Islamic invaders came with a different code – the tradition of the Prophet. It required its warriors to fall upon the helpless civilian population after a decisive victory had been won the battlefield. It required them to sack and burn down villages and towns after the defenders had died fighting or had fled. The cows, the Brahmins, and the Bhikshus invited their special attention in mass murder of non-combatants. The temples and monasteries were their special targets in an orgy of pillage and arson. Those whom they did not kill, they captured and sold as slaves. The magnitude of the booty looted even from the bodies of the dead was a measure of the success of the military mission. And they did all this as mujahids and ghazis in the service of Allah and the Last Prophet.

The long Islamic march was stayed when the Seljuk Turks began to invade Muslim lands at the time of the millennium. The Turks eventually converted to Islam, transformed almost overnight from a barbarian horde to righteous Shiite warriors, and pressed forward through Asia Minor to Constantinople, the eastern capitol of the Holy Roman Empire and sacred center of Eastern Christian Orthodoxy.

In 1092, Pope Urban II summoned the French nobles to a Church council in a field at Clermont in an effort to ward off the Islamic conquest of Asia Minor and Eastern Europe - the effort became known as the Crusades.

The Crusades, which lasted for nearly four hundred years, came to an end on Tuesday, May 29, 1453 when the Ottoman Turks conquered the Byzantium capital of Constantinople. The Muslim soldiers slew everyone they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. When the slaughter and the pillaging was over, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II ordered an Islamic scholar to mount the high pulpit of Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral of Eastern Christianity, and declare that there was no God but Allah and that Muhammad was his prophet. The magnificent cathedral was transformed into a mosque; hundreds of other churches within Constantinople suffered the same fate. Thousands of Christians were murdered or suppressed to the status of dhimmis; 50,000 women and children were hauled off as slaves.

Throughout the subsequent centuries, the Muslim expansion continued as the Ottoman hordes swept through much of the Ukraine. The Turks were at the gates of Vienna when they were stopped by the great Polish king John Sobieski and thirty thousand Polish hussars on a day that marked the high point of the Islamic expansion in Europe: September 11, 1684. It was a date that became embedded in the psyche of radical Islam -- a day of infamy that could only be offset by a day of triumph. That day would come exactly 318 years later on September 11, 2001.

What was the goal of this seemingly endless warfare? The answer can be found in the words of the Prophet, who commanded his followers “to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger.”  The large scale jihads came to end after 1683, not because the people of Islam had rejected or reformed their doctrine of universal submission, but rather because the Muslim world had grown too weak and too poor to continue the struggle. Commenting on the history of Islam, Teddy Roosevelt wrote the following in 1916:

Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves NOT to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Moslems who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Muslim and the Christian religion would be exterminated. Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Moslem aggressor.

The situation within Islam underwent a dramatic change with the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula and the infusion of billions of petro dollars into impoverished Muslim lands. Everywhere on planet earth, Muslims were on the march to establish a new world order under the dictates of shariah. Violence in the name of Allah erupted in such diverse places as Medea. Algeria; Karachi, Pakistan; Yala, Thailand; Bresje, Kosovo; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Beirut, Lebanon; Mombassa, Kenya; Kashmir, India; Casablanca, Morocco; Numan, Nigeria; Grozny, Chechnya; Antwerp, Belgium; Toulouse, France; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Makhachkala, Dagestan; Moscow, Russia; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Cairo, Egypt; Montreal, Canada; Manila, the Philippines; Natore, Bangladesh; Limgheti, Mauritania; Baku, Azerbaijan; Nagele, Ethiopia; Ruesselsheim, Germany; Amman, Jordan; Jala-Abad, Kyrgyzstan; Malmo, Sweden; Gaza, Palestinian Authority; Inchkhe, Dagestan; Doha, Qatar; Shanghai, China; Karabulak, Ingushetia; and Dafur, Sudan. In addition to the events of 9/11, some of the more significant incidents of Islamic barbarity are as follows:

March 2002, Israel
Three bombs, independently planned but all timed to coincide with the Passover festival. One hits a Passover dinner at a hotel in Netanya, killing 20 people. Another in Tel Aviv kills 29 and a suicide bomber attacks an Arab-owned restaurant in Haifa and kills 14.

October 12 2002, Bali, Indonesia
Car bombs outside nightclubs popular with foreign tourists kill 202 people, 91 of them Australians. An Indonesian Islamist group with Al-Qaida links is blamed.

October 23 2002, Moscow, Russia
Chechen gunmen and women take over a theatre and hold everyone inside hostage. They later shoot dead several of the hostages. Russian troops use gas to subdue the hostage takers, and kill 50 of them. However, the gas also kills 179 of the hostages.

May 12 2003, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Suicide bomber attacks on residential compounds inhabited by westerners kills 34 people. Al-Qaida blamed.

May 16 2003, Casablanca, Morocco
Five bombs targeted at Jewish and western people in the city kill 41, mostly Moroccans. Six Europeans also die.

November 20 2003, Istanbul, Turkey
Truck bomb attacks on the British Consulate and the HSBC bank kill over 60 people, including the British consul general in the city.

March 11 2004, Madrid
Explosions aboard four commuter trains arriving at Atocha station during the morning rush hour. Bombs were in backpacks, and detonated using a mobile phone, killing 191 people and injuring 1,800. Spanish government of Jose Maria Aznar at first suggests the Basque separatist group Eta is to blame, but later concedes the attacks were the work of Islamists.

September 1 - 3 2004, Beslan, Russia
Islamist gunmen take over 1,000 hostages, mostly children, at a school in North Ossetia. After a three-day siege many of the hostages are killed in an explosion in the school gym, after which Russian troops storm the building. The final death toll is over 330, many of them children. 800 more are injured.

July 7, 2005, London, England
Four suicide bombers struck in central London on Thursday 7 July, killing 52 people and injuring more than 770. The coordinated attacks hit the transport system as the morning rush hour drew to a close. Three bombs went off at or around 0850 BST on underground trains just outside Liverpool Street and Edgware Road stations, and on another traveling between King’s Cross and Russell Square. The final explosion was around an hour later on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square, not far from King’s Cross.

November 26, 2008, Mumbai, India
A group of Islamic fanatics launch 10 coordinated attacks in India’s financial capital, killing 173 people and injuring 308.

In the wake of 9/11, scores of jihadi attacks against American civilians have been thwarted. The list includes plans to set off a radiological device in midtown Manhattan; to collapse the Brooklyn Bridge with blow-torches; to bomb the New York Stock Exchange; to detonate explosives near Madison Square Garden on the eve of the Republican National Convention; to launch attacks on hospitals, medical facilities, and food chains throughout the country; to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago; to kill U.S. troops at Fort Dix; and to incite the jet-fuel artery that runs through the JFK International Airport. Other attacks were brought to fruition. John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo – better known as “the Beltway Snipers” – became two of most successful homegrown jihadis by launching15 sniper attacks, which killed ten people and critically wounded three others in the Washington, D.C. area. Their arrests did little to end the murders in the name of Allah as horrific incidents continued to mount, including the slaughter at the Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City.

The war on terror – a misnomer from the start – is being lost. Since 9/11, 13,270 Islamic terror attacks have been launched from China to Seattle, Washington, leaving 80,000 people dead and over 120,000 injured. Yet government officials, including Barack Obama, continue to speak of Islam as the religion of peace, Protestant ministers (including Robert Schuller and Rick Warren) insist that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, and Roman Catholic pontiffs continue to kiss the Qu’ran.

It’s time for all good men and women to take a firm stand against Islam and the forces of evil.