Difference between revisions of "Islamism"

Understand: We are likely to continue getting more such reports because in many areas, Israeli security force have only just retaken control after clearing out lurking jihadist cells. The extent and shocking nature of the carnage is still being uncovered.

The shocking nature of the carnage is not a case of “militants” who got carried away in the heat of battle. This is the jihadist way of war. There was not much battling in any event: These were jihadists strategically using terror, as they are instructed is their divinely ordained obligation, to obliterate their perceived enemies. Not just break their will; extirpate them. In my column on the homepage this morning, I try to explain why it is important to call them jihadists and stop assessing them under Western standards of warfare. Further, we have to grasp that their Jew-hatred is doctrinal — this is not, pace the revisionism of transnational progressives, a mere territorial dispute in which aliens were intruded into Arab Muslim due to Western guilt over the Holocaust. We need to see clear that these are jihadists catalyzed by a fundamentalist, sharia-supremacist interpretation of Islamic scripture; otherwise, we will never understand their objectives, the atrocious lengths to which they will go to achieve them, and the need to defeat them utterly because there can be no modus vivendi with them.

From the column:

The Quran and hadiths (collections of the sayings and doings of Mohammed, Islam’s prop_het), command jihadists to strike “terror” into the hearts of their enemies — to wage war ferociously and mercilessly. This includes regarding as their enemies all non-Muslims who decline to submit to the dominion of sharia. The distinction between combatants and noncombatants, so central to Western laws of warfare and human rights, is eviscerated in sharia. Those we regard as “civilians” the jihadist sees as loyalists of their non-Muslim enemies who pay taxes that stand up the armed forces arrayed against them. They are fair game for forcible attacks.

Understand: As we witnessed with the weekend’s unspeakable attacks on Israeli civilians — parents killed in front of their children, old women and children taken captive, revelers mowed down indiscriminately, and able-bodied men systematically killed — this includes rape and enslavement. The Quran (in sura 33:50) explicitly approves of jihadists’ using as concubines “those whom thy right hand possesses out of the captives of war whom Allah has assigned to thee.” (This endorsement is repeated in sura 4:23-24, which excludes captives — those “whom your right hands possess” — from the categories of women with whom Muslim men must abstain from sexual relations.) Furthermore, Reliance of the Traveller, a sharia manual endorsed by influential Islamic scholars, instructs: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s marriage is immediately annulled” — meaning she is available for sex slavery.

In fundamentalist strongholds, such as Gaza, non-Muslims are dehumanized in the education of Muslim children. The idea is not to raise an army of “militants.” The goal of jihad is to terrorize the enemy into surrender and submission; it is not to conduct combat operations limited to strategic military objectives that avoid or at least minimize civilian casualties. That kind of discrimination and proportionality, bedrock principles of Western warfare, is alien to jihad.

Classical sharia is systematically discriminatory against all non-Muslims, but the contempt for Jews is especially intense. As recounted over the weekend, Muslim scripture foretells an end-of-times war between Muslims and Jews. That vision is etched into the Hamas charter, which is unabashedly dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. Mohammed and his companions repeatedly warred with Jewish tribes. The Islamic claim on Israel is scripturally rooted in al-Isra’, the “night journey,” in which Allah is said to have arranged the pro_phet’s transport, on a winged beast, “from the sacred mosque to the farthest mosque” (sura 17) — i.e., from what is now the Kaaba in Mecca to the al-Aqsa Mosque at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Young Muslims are taught, based on hadiths (see, e.g., Bukhari 3:47:786 and Muslim 26:5430) that Mohammed was poisoned to death by a Jewish woman.^[3]