Why we need an Anti-Islam Manual

I've written about this topic several times in the past (see "Further Reading" at the bottom).

Today, I just want to cite a specific example. I believe the War of Ideas aspect of the Anti-Islam Movement -- i.e., continuing to try to persuade our fellow PC MC Westerners to wake up to the problem of Islam -- is important.

I believe it is important because I think a sufficient number of our fellow PC MCs can be woken up; they are not all hopeless. Indeed, I think at least a slim majority of them can be woken up. The problem is only how long it will take to prod them from their comfortable and complex slumbers.

So, anyway, today's example is one microcosm of the War of Ideas -- my humble little attempt on one Internet discussion forum to try to persuade a PC MC of just one angle (out of hundreds) of the problem of Islam. This bears on the exigent need for an Anti-Islam Manual because it took me three solid hours to amass the necessary information and links in order to rebut this particular PC MC person -- and that entire three hours went into just one particular comment!

Part of the reason it took so long is that I try to make it a point to use only mainstream media sources for debating PC MCs, because they tend to sneer at Jihad Watch, or Jewish newspapers, or FOX News. Using mainstream media sources will eliminate that particular obfuscation they like to play.

If the A.I.M. (Anti-Islam Movement) had an A.I.M. (an Anti-Islam Manual) -- that is, a definitive, comprehensive yet concise digital document of all the points and counterpoints of the problem of Islam -- I could have punched in "Afghanistan Islamic apostasy", and in a matter of seconds, I would have been ready to post my comment (with a few extra minutes perhaps of polishing).

This particular comment I posted on a new discussion forum I recently discovered (about which I have written in the two articles immediately below this one). The PC MC in question calls herself "Mrs. Lucysnow". Her PC MC I'd say is about average -- neither is she veering off into rabid Leftism, nor is she dipping down (or rather up) into asymptotic territory. I.e., she's a bloody idiot about Islam.

After several back-and-forth exchanges between us (which the reader can survey by going to the thread there titled “US Casualties in Afghanistan up 500% under Obama” -- but you better hurry, because I've already received a "warning" from one of the forum administrators, and I could get banned and my posts perhaps deleted), during which she pulls out the usual PC MC memes and obfuscations, "Mrs. Lucysnow" ends one post with the question:

Show me evidence to support your claim that there is a law in Afghanistan that a person is killed if they leave Islam?

My answer, which took me three hours to research and compose, was as follows:

The fact that you don't know this is telling (but, alas, not surprising).

This past February, as this Telegraph article reported, NATO chief Anders Rasmussen appealed to the Afghanistan government to spare the life of a Muslim, Musa Sayed, who had left Islam to convert to Christianity -- who was sentenced to death according to its "moderate" constitution which is explicitly based in Sharia Law.

And from a CNN story back in late 2010 on the same case:

"According to Afghanistan's constitution, if there is no clear verdict as to whether an act is criminal or not in the penal code of the Afghan Constitution, then it would be referred to sharia law where the judge has an open hand in reaching a verdict," Shenwari said.
Under sharia law, converting from Islam to Christianity is punishable by death....
(I'm amazed a mainstream news source actually recognized that unremarkable yet horrific fact; since we are usually coddled with the milk & honey of assurances that sharia law is benign.)

The Afghan constitution identifies the country as an Islamic republic, and says that "followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law, " but "no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam" (Chapter 1, Articles 1-3).

An amendment in the tenth chapter of the constitution adds: "The provisions of adherence to the fundamentals of the sacred religion of Islam and the regime of the Islamic Republic cannot be amended."

(Thanks to Marisol at Jihad Watch for the previous two paragraphs.)

And, of course, sharia law is part of the Sunna, which is based centrally on the hadiths (or "ahadith" for those who are precise about their transliteration from Arabic) -- which are the Sayings of Mohammed, whose Dos and Don'ts preserved therein are the very heart of all Islamic law. The most authoritative collection of hadiths is Sahih Bukhari.

According to Bukhari:

Muhammad says, "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him."
-- Sahih al-Bukhari, 9.84.57

Other hadiths back this up, for example, Jami At-Tirmidhi:

...the Messenger of Allah said: It is not permissible to shed the blood of a Muslim, except a man who committed adultery after being married, or one who reverted to Kufr after becoming a Muslim...
And Sunan an-Nasa’i: It is not permissible to shed the blood of a Muslim except in one of three cases: A man who reverts to Kufr after becoming Muslim, or commits adultery after being married, or one who kills a soul unlawfully.
(as well as the hadiths of Abu Dawud, Ibn Majah, Malik, Tayalisi, and Ibn Hanbal).

Back in 2006, another Muslim in Afghanistan was similarly sentenced to death for leaving Islam ("apostasy"), Abdul Rahman. Only concerted international pressure convinced the Afghanistan government from relenting and sparing his life. (After all, they don't want to annoy the Americans who give them billions annually in the form of cash and the construction, and reconstruction (after frequent destruction by their homegrown and imported fanatics), of infrastructure projects.). An Afghanistan court ruled that he was "mentally ill" (which is one way to avoid getting killed under sharia law for apostasy, since sharia law stipulates that only if a person is an adult and mentally capable should he be killed for leaving Islam -- wow, how rational of them to be so obsessive-compulsively punctilious about their grotesque fanaticism!).

And so, Rahman was spirited away to Italy for his safety, since after being released from jail, Islamic clerics threatened that they would incite the people to "pull him into pieces" if they could.

From an AP story, reproduced by the Washington Post at the time:

Senior Muslim clerics demanded Thursday that an Afghan man on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity be executed, warning that if the government caves in to Western pressure and frees him, they will incite people to "pull him into pieces."
That AP story also has this precious quote and information on one of those clerics:

"Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hard-line regime was ousted in 2001.
Also this MSNBC report at the time:

Senior clerics condemned Rahman as an apostate.

Rahman had “committed the greatest sin” by converting to Christianity and deserved to be killed, cleric Abdul Raoulf said in a sermon Friday at Herati Mosque.

“God’s way is the right way, and this man whose name is Abdul Rahman is an apostate,” he told about 150 worshippers.

Another cleric, Ayatullah Asife Muhseni, told a gathering of preachers and intellectuals at a Kabul hotel that the Afghan president had no right to overturn the punishment of an apostate.

He also demanded that clerics be able to question Rahman in jail to discover why he had converted to Christianity. He suggested it could have been the result of a conspiracy by Western nations or Jews.

At a fruit market in Kabul, many ordinary Afghans said they supported the death penalty, but some wanted more investigation before meting out the punishment. [Gee, how discerning of them!]

Really, you need to brush up on your Islam. There's no excuse for this Islamo-illiteracy in the year 2011.

Hesperado

View Public Profile

Send a private message to Hesperado

Visit Hesperado's homepage!

Find More Posts by Hesperado

Further Reading:

Another discussion thread on that same forum where I have been wrangling with PC MCs:

“Your War on Terror: The Terrorists are Winning” (my contributions don’t begin until about page 4 or 5 out of the 7 pages there)

Also see my older essay on the need for an Anti-Islam Manual (and at the end, I link to three additional essays I wrote about the same topic):

The aim of the A.I.M. should be an A.I.M.

Update:

My PC MC interlocutor, "Mrs. Lucysnow" replied, and I respond to her reply (hers in italics, mine in quotation marks):

And this affects you how? What do you care what the government of Afghanistan or Pakistan does with its citizens?

"It's evidence of the kind of sick fanaticism that is inculcated and breeding in the Muslim world and which is spilling out into the rest of the world in the form of terrorist attacks -- regardless of the "diversity" of it."

You wanted them to have a government, if you want them to enact laws that mirror your society then why don't you just ship off all of your public officials to live in Afghanistan and occupy the government forever. Its their country, its their culture, its their laws they can do what they like.

"I don't want them to have our form of government -- chiefly because I don't believe they want it or are capable of it. I don't want us to be there at all (except in terms of surgical strikes now and then by air and using Delta Force-type commando operations only when absolutely necessary; e.g., to nip some jihadist cell in the making, or to take out some influential figure Obama-vs.-Osama-style). I don't want to help them -- either with money, or our men and women's lives and limbs, or with ideas of any kind. I just want to let them stew in their own grotesquely sick and ghoulish and outrageously anti-liberal fanaticism, and contain them there and not let them come into the West."

But I have no doubt this debate will go on and on, seemingly interminably; for the Mrs. Lucysnows of the West are not thinking with a brain, but rather reacting like a programmed machine activated not by electricity, but by emotions. (Notice, by the way, how she first had asked me to verify that Afghanistan has a law to kill apostates. She wouldn't have asked me if it didn't strike her as of concern (as it should any normal human); and yet in her subsequent response, she throws any semblance of concern out the window and doesn't address one iota of the considerable proof I marshalled for three hours -- instead reacting with a new maneuver from the programming of her PC MC machine that has taken over her brain.)

It will take a long time to get through these thick skulls; but as I said at the top, I do have hope with a long time and patience, we will get there. Unfortunately, because they will be so slow in waking up, in the meantime Muslims will be able to wreak considerable havoc and mayhem against us in the coming decades -- which could be avoidable, if PC MCs would only wake up sooner.