"We Can't Go to War With 1.3 Billion Muslims!"

This is another installment of the series, Answers to Objections. This objection is not usually spoken out loud, but it's a central fear lurking behind much of the resistance you get when you talk about Islamic doctrine.

When you're talking to people, you want them to accept the simple fact that orthodox Islamic teachings are very straightforward, and they call for intolerance and violence toward non-Muslims and an unrelenting effort to make the world submit to Shari'a law.

Some people you talk to will put up every objection they can think of because they don't want to accept this premise.

If they articulated their fear, it would sound something like this: "For God's sake, that CAN'T be true, because it would mean we would have to go to war with 1.3 billion Muslims, and we can't do that!" Some people actually say it out loud.

Like many of the objections, this one is a great opportunity to insert a little more information into a brain that is likely almost entirely empty of any facts about Islam. Here are some possible responses you can give:

1. Luckily, we don't have to go to war with all of them. Most of the people who are now Muslims never chose to be so. Their ancestors were almost all forced to be Muslims. Their ancestor's whole country was conquered and Shari'a law was imposed. Shari'a puts pressure on everyone to be Muslim, and not just in name only. It is against Shari'a law to skip the five prayers a day or skip fasting during Ramadan or skip paying zakat (alms to the mosque). In other words, the practice of orthodox Islam is enforced by law, so after a few generations, it would be hard to think outside of being a Muslim, especially when the penalty for leaving the faith is death.

But what this means is that many of them would choose to live their lives without the constant domination of Shari'a if they had the option. So even if it came to war, we wouldn't have to go to war with 1.3 billion.

2. What would you go to war to do? I mean, why would you think a war would be necessary?

3. We don't need to go to war, we only need to change some of our own laws and some of our own foreign policies. And sometimes we wouldn't even have to change them, we would only need to start enforcing them. For example, it is illegal to try to overthrow the government or to even plot to do so. It is sedition. It's already against the law. And yet in three-fourths of the mosques in the U.S., jihad is being preached. Jihad means "the struggle to bring everyone on earth under the law of Allah." In other words, preaching jihad is sedition.

And jihad is an essential element of Islam. It is a core tenet. This isn't some fringe teaching that nobody cares about. This is a central purpose of Islam.

If we want the orthodox Muslims in our country to stop working to undermine and overthrow the government, we will have to make a distinction between the political aspects of Islam and the religious aspects of Islam, and we'll have to stop people from committing sedition. We don't need to go to war. We only need to educate enough non-Muslims so that no more politicians ignorant of Islam are voted into office. The one thing that needs to happen is education.

4. The problem is not with Muslims, so we don't have to go to war with them. The problem is not even with Islamic doctrine. Our problem is the abject ignorance of the majority of non-Muslims. Because of this ignorance, the West is conceding its freedoms. Let me illustrate the principle with victims of sociopaths. In the comments on an article about sociopaths, most of the commenters are victims of sociopaths, and they tell their stories about what happened to them — they were conned out of their life savings or they were married to someone who abused their children or one of their parents deliberately drives them crazy, etc. But two of the people who have commented are themselves sociopaths, and their comments illuminate an important principle.

The point of view of most of the victims is that they don't understand how sociopaths can be so mean or cruel or heartless. The point of view of the sociopaths is that they don't understand how normal people can be so naive as to trust everyone, so foolish as to never protect themselves from someone who has already proven to be dangerous, or so stupid as to sign over the deed to their house!

Same with non-Muslims dealing with orthodox Islam. Okay, so it's a Muslim's duty to strive for the political goal of establishing Shari'a law throughout the world. That's what they do and the "true believers" will never stop trying. But we don't have to allow it! They are only making progress toward their goal because we let them. We trust them. We make treaties with them. We allow them to immigrate. We make assumptions about them (like they must be just like us, their religion must be similar to other religions we know about, etc.). We are conceding our freedoms. They are not taking our freedoms. We are forgoing our own self-preservation. We are voluntarily giving away our ability to defend ourselves.

The problem is not with them, it's with us. We don't need to go to war. We need to stop being stupid, and that can't happen until more people know some basic facts about Islamic doctrine.

Most of the people commenting on that sociopath site said they were surprised to find out there was even such a thing as a sociopath. The phenomenon of "everyday sociopaths" is not very well known. People know about psychopathic serial killers, but most people don't know there is such a thing as people walking around in ordinary lives who have no empathy for others and cannot develop it, people whose only goal in life is to win and dominate, people who feel no pity or remorse and who have no emotional conflict when they are cruel.

Some of the people who told their sad tales were married to a sociopath for years without ever realizing such a person could exist, so they were totally frustrated, anguished, and confused by their spouse's behavior, and of course, in their ignorance they made one stupid, self-defeating mistake after another.

The free world is doing the same thing with orthodox Islam's relentless, self-serving aggression — making one stupid, self-defeating mistake after another (read more about that here). The stupidity must stop. The only thing missing is enough people who have at least a passing familiarity with basic Islamic teachings.

Okay, that's four possible answers to the objection, "But we can't go to war with 1.3 billion Muslims!"

I would appreciate it (and so would future readers) if you could come up with better answers than these, and post them in the comments below this article. We can pool our resources, pool our intelligence, and help each other do the one thing that must be done: Educate our fellow non-Muslims.

The above was excerpted from the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam.