Twelve Tactics of Taqiyya

From the inimitable Trencherbone, here is a list of twelve taqiyya tactics used by orthodox Muslims with great success against their enemies in Western democracies. Below is an edited version of Trencherbone's article. Unfortunately, his original article and his blog have been taken down.

Allah is "the best of deceivers" (Quran 3.54), and since the prime directive is to spread Islam by any means whatsoever, it should not be surprising that deceiving unbelievers is acceptable behavior if carried out for the benefit of Islam.

This "sacred deception" is known as taqiyya. It can take many forms, including outright lies, feigned moderation, and condemnations of terrorist attacks to the non-Muslims while celebrating the attacks with fellow Muslims.

Here are some of the ploys, arguments, logical fallacies and diversionary tactics used by taqiyya tacticians:

1. Taqiyya about taqiyya. Muslims deny that taqiyya exists, or that it is used to deceive infidels. "There is no such thing as taqiyya." Or "Taqiyya is something I never heard of and I had to go and look it up."

2. Playing the race card and guilt by association. An accusation of racism is such a trump card that jihadists will play it whenever they can. Despite Islam not being a race, any criticism of Islam immediately gets the knee-jerk retaliation of "racism." For example, "You are expressing the same views about Islam as racists, therefore you are a racist." This is similar logic, "Communists believe two and two make four. You believe two and two make four. Therefore you are a Communist."

3. Godwin's Law. A special (and inevitable) version of guilt by association with racism used in online discussions, whereby the first person to invoke Hitler or the Nazis wins the argument. The "logic" is something like this:

CRITICISM OF ISLAM = RACISM = NAZISM
Therefore, if you criticize Islam you are a Nazi.

4. Circular reasoning. The Quran says it is the word of God. So whatever it says must be true. Therefore it is true that the Quran is the word of God because it says so.

5. The infidels' quotes from the Quran are always taken out of context. For example, "Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them" is taken out of context, and really means "Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them setting fire to your house" — or something similar.

6. Infidels can't understand the original Arabic of the Quran. So "Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them" is actually a Medieval Arabic expression meaning "Help old ladies across busy streets and remember to feed the birds in winter."

7. Tu Quoque (you also). "We blow people up and behead them but you do the same." Normally this is used in attempts to refute arguments that Islam is intrinsically violent. Often people refer back to the Crusades, the Inquisition, etc. Also "There are equally nasty parts in the Bible." Yes, there are violent episodes in the Bible, but the Bible is descriptive of battles and massacres long ago, whereas the Quran is prescriptive of battles and massacres yet to come.

8. "Abrahamic and monotheistic faith" false kin argument. This scam usually takes the form of "Islam is just a further development of Christianity, a brother Abrahamic or monotheist faith." Of course it isn't. Islam is a travesty and perversion of Christianity in many respects, and Jesus would probably have advised the pedophile Mohammed to tie a millstone round his neck and jump into the sea (Mark 9:42). In Islam, stoning of women is still a major spectator sport, whereas Jesus forbade it (John 8:7). Human sacrifice is an abomination in Judaism and Christianity, but is encouraged in Islam.

9. Quoting abrogated verses from the Quran in order to appear moderate. A favorite one is "Let there be no compulsion in religion." This verse and many like it are actually null and void and disregarded by all Muslims (though not by gullible infidels). They are peaceful Meccan verses which are completely cancelled by later and much more violent Medinan verses. Read more about abrogation here.

10. "You owe us a debt of gratitude because Islam is the basis of Western civilization." This sort of statement is usually backed up by revisionist arguments that Muslims invented everything and were responsible for the Renaissance. In some ways this is a rather pathetic quest for significance. Muslim culture has been moribund for the past 600 years, whereas the West has forged ahead. Muslims now want a stake in the success story by claiming they were somehow responsible for the West's development.

11. "A third of the world's population believe in Islam, so it deserves respect." But not so long ago a third of the world's population believed the earth was flat. Numbers don't mean anything, especially when the Islamic population is the most backward and illiterate on earth. Muslims are very keen on "respect," but someone should tell them that respect needs to be earned.

12. "We are victims of Islamophobia." Orthodox Muslims are always playing the victim, if not of racism then of the even more heinous thought-crime of Islamophobia. Of course there is no such thing as Islamophobia, since a phobia is an irrational fear, whereas fear of Islam as a clear and present danger is a totally rational reaction from any infidel.

Learn more about taqiyya and how it is used here.

See a video about taqiyya here.

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Lessons on Jihad From the Movie, "What About Bob?"

I was thinking of writing an article about the infuriating cleverness of orthodox Muslims, and I was wondering what I could use to illustrate what they're doing. And then it came to me in a flash: The movie, What About Bob?

In the movie, Bill Murray plays a psychiatric patient who drives his psychiatrist crazy (Dr. Leo Marvin, played by Richard Dreyfus).

I just watched it again and the parallels to orthodox Islam's dealings with the West are amazing. Bob uses the same techniques on Dr. Marvin that orthodox Muslims use against the United States and Europe, and with similar results: Bob successfully fools everyone except Dr. Marvin, and Dr. Marvin becomes infuriated and helpless, but unable to stop it.

Bob is able to cleverly insert himself into Dr. Marvin's life without his consent, and able to turn Dr. Marvin's friends and family against him.

As I watched, I kept stopping to write notes every time I saw a parallel. Here are my notes:

1. Bob's stand is: I am suffering. Islam's stand is: We are an oppressed people, we are under attack, we are the underdog, and we are suffering. Bob manages to make normal events in life cause him to suffer. Orthodox Muslims take anything their enemies do and turns it into "oppression." And if their enemies do nothing offensive, they create opportunities to be affronted.

Read any mainstream Muslim publication, like the Muslim Public Affairs Committee newsletter, and you will see a strong theme running through almost every article: Muslims are oppressed and persecuted (and therefore must "defend" themselves).

I subscribe to several pro-Muslim e-mail newsletters, and this is an extremely common theme. Every little "hate-crime" they can come up with proves that Muslims are an oppressed minority. I recently read this: In the year 2007, the number of hate-crimes in the U.S. committed against someone because of their religion was 1400. Here's how the hate-crimes break down by religion:

Anti-Jewish 969
Anti-Other Religion 130
Anti-Islamic 115
Anti-Multiple Religions 62
Anti-Catholic 61
Anti-Protestant 57
Anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc. 6

Over the course of a year, and with 300 million people in this country, that's a pretty low incidence of hate-crimes against Muslims. But their perpetual position is that they are an oppressed minority. Here's why.

2. Bob uses every technique he can find to keep pushing for what he wants. And he uses the one tool that gives him the most leverage with normal people: Pity. Evoke genuine pity, and you can pretty much gain any concession you want. Read more about this.

The stealth jihad uses this principle constantly. Jihadis try to portray themselves — just as their leader Mohammad did — as innocent victims of wrongdoing. Then, having aroused pity, they seek a concession of some kind.

They continue gaining concessions and giving none. Islam is a ratchet: It only goes one way.

3. Bob uses deceit masterfully. Bob hires a hooker to portray Dr. Marvin's sister to get through on the phone (when Dr. Marvin is on vacation and is not taking calls). Bob impersonates a detective and lies to the operator to get information about where Dr. Marvin is vacationing.

Islam has a principle called taqiyya, which means "religious deception." They can and do lie to non-Muslims and they have Allah's permission to do so as long as it serves the cause of Islam.

In the movie, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, there are several good examples, captured on film, of a Muslim leader speaking to Western media, saying one thing, and then it shows the same leader speaking to their fellow Muslims saying just the opposite. You see them speaking peace and tolerance to Westerners and two days later vigorously preaching jihad against the West to their fellow Muslims. This is taqiyya.

Probably the single most important reason orthodox Muslims have gotten away with so much is because they use deceit masterfully.

4. Bob pushes for concessions because he is special, unique, weird. And Bob captures everyone's attention and doesn't let them go about their normal lives.

Muslims do the same thing. In Norway, for example, Muslims were agitating for a law that would make it illegal to serve alcohol in discos on certain nights (because they are uncomfortable around alcohol). Hege Storhaug, the co-founder of Human Rights Service, rejects such a proposal. "All the time they have special rules," says Storhaug, "and we reject special requirements. We get a split-up society and Islam gets more presence in the public sphere. People force religious opinions on others. In the most extreme consequence it leads to the Islamization of society...All the time it's Muslims who come with special requirements. We never hear a peep from Catholics, Jews, Hindus, etc."

One way to try to gain a concession is to simply ask. Another way (and far more effective) is to ask while providing a good reason why an exception should be made for you that would not be made for others. Bob had "special needs" because he was agoraphobic or afraid of sailing or deathly afraid of germs, and people went out of their way to accommodate him, conceding things to him they would never concede to a normal person.

Islam does the same thing. And they often succeed (read more about what kinds of concessions they have gained). They press for concessions because they are oppressed or because they are unique (they have particular needs because of their unique religion), or because they've been wronged or persecuted or whatever.

5. Bob seems really nice to everyone but his enemy. People usually recognize Bob is unusual, but they think he is innocent. But Dr. Marvin sees what he's doing and how deliberately and insidiously he's doing it.

By the skillful use of taqiyya, Muslims — even Muslims we know to be bloodthirsty killers — are considered "really nice people" by those who don't know better. (Read a good example of that here.)

Islamic countries are often very friendly to Western countries while at the same time whipping up national hatred against those same Western countries on Islamic television stations, and funding global jihad against those same countries.

6. Bob uses public embarrassment to force concessions. When he arrives in the small town where the well-respected Dr. Marvin spends his summer vacation, Bob starts yelling at the top of his lungs in the middle of the street, "Dr. Marvin! Doctor Leo Marvin!" He keeps yelling until he has everyone's attention and Dr. Marvin can't simply ignore him and get away, which is what he was planning on doing.

Orthodox Muslims try to embarrass organizations into doing what they want. They will go to court even though they know they will lose, they will get the press involved. They'll do whatever it takes to embarrass people or companies or governments into conceding. Radio stations have fired good people because the station didn't want to deal with the public embarrassment of a lawsuit. Politicians restrain themselves and go out of their way not to say anything honest that might be offensive to the super-sensitive Muslim-advocacy organizations, because those organizations will do what they can to embarrass the politicians. Even comedians avoid talking about Islam.

Orthodox Muslims have wormed their way into training programs for police and intelligence agencies and intimidated them into not saying anything that might lead to public embarrassment, demonstrating again and again that the Muslim organizations will use public embarrassment to silence critics of Islam.

7. Bob uses Dr. Marvin's enemies against him. There is a husband and wife in town who are angry because the rich city doctor came and bought their dream home out from under them. Bob gets these people to help him, and they do it to help ruin Dr. Marvin's life.

Orthodox Muslims are actively converting and recruiting disgruntled convicts in prison — people who are already enemies of the society. Iran sent soldiers into Iraq in order to kill U.S. soldiers, but Iran also supplied Russia and China with oil, so if the U.S. wants to do something about Iran, they'd have our two biggest enemies to contend with. In essence, Iran used America's enemies against them.

Closer to home, those of us who are in the process of alerting our fellow citizens to the danger of Islam's prime directive have enemies among our own fellow non-Muslim citizens. The blind multiculturalists in the media actively fight against us, trying to discredit anyone who criticizes Islam, and the orthodox Muslims use those enemies against us.

I get a newsletter from CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) that brags in almost every issue about how they are bringing this suit against this person or sending press releases out about this or that grievance, and you can see from their wording that they are hitting every hot-button they can think of to gain sympathy from our fellow non-Muslim "enemies."

8. Bob exploits all of Dr. Marvin's weaknesses — his egotism, his desire to win his family's love and approval, his failures and embarrassments, his family's kindness and innocence, his family's resentment against Dr. Marvin's pomposity — Bob exploits it all to get what he wants.

Orthodox Muslims exploit Westerners' weaknesses, too. One of our "weaknesses" is our reverence for life. Jihadis will hide behind their own civilians during a battle, knowing Western soldiers will not open fire.

Here's another example of this principle, from DhimmiWatch:

"Palestinian jihad fighters have even used Christian sites and people as shields against the Israelis. In Spring 2002 they appropriated Bethlehem’s Manger Square as a base of operations, knowing that Israeli forces would not attack them there and would face international opprobrium if they did. This activity precipitated the siege of the Church of the Nativity in April and May of that year. After launching attacks against the Israelis from Manger Square, a group of jihadists fled into the church, where they remained for 39 days — secure in the knowledge that Israel would not attack a Christian holy site. Meanwhile, they desecrated the church."

Orthodox Muslims are masters of exploiting their enemy's weaknesses. They immigrate into free countries and then use the democratic process and rights of free speech to agitate against those freedoms and seek to subvert the democracy.

They also exploit the multicultural beliefs of the resident population in order to wage jihad by gaining concessions.

9. Bob is absolutely relentless. He doesn't let up ever. Neither do orthodox Muslims. They keep infiltrating, they keep immigrating, they keep agitating, they keep killing, they keep intimidating, and they will never stop on their own. They've been doing it for 1400 years, and they are determined to keep it up until the whole world acknowledges there is no god but Allah and Mohammad is His Messenger. They will never give up until the whole world falls under the rule of Islamic law. This is Islam's Prime Directive.

10. Bob makes sure every response Dr. Marvin makes will backfire. He ensures that no matter what Dr. Marvin does to return to his normal life or solve his problem, it will not work. In the documentary, Target America, you can see each successive American president through the seventies, eighties, and nineties try many different ways of dealing with orthodox Muslims, and every attempt backfired.

The orthodox Muslims made sure they set up a situation where no matter what the U.S. did, it would go badly.

The same infuriating frustration Dr. Marvin feels is what I saw on the faces of all the presidents in Target America as they tried and failed to deal successfully with hijackings and captured hostages and bombings.

11. No matter what he does, Bob makes Dr. Marvin look like the mean one and Bob look like the innocent, underdog victim of Dr. Marvin's apparently bad-tempered selfishness. Osama bin Laden's plan was to run planes into the Twin Towers in the hopes that the U.S. would overreact, counting on the fact that the violent overreaction would cause Muslims around the world to unite against the West.

Many people think that's exactly what happened. Muslims flew planes into the Twin Towers, killing thousands of office workers, and in the end, the U.S. looks like the mean one to a lot of people, and Muslims look like the underdog victims who only need potable water and a little compassion from big, bad America.

12. Bob causes Dr. Marvin's wife and kids to sympathize with Bob and to resent and reject Dr. Marvin. They all try to look out for poor Bob. They push for Bob to get what he wants. This is analogous to orthodox Muslims causing multiculturalist Westerners to sympathize with Muslims and turn against their fellow countrymen who are trying to protect us all from further harm.

So we have one group of people in the U.S. who want to make sure we're no longer vulnerable to attack by orthodox Muslims. And we have another segment of the U.S. who wants "stop the hate," wants to "give peace a chance," and wants to stop "racial profiling."

In other words, orthodox Muslims have successfully turned some of our own people against each other. They have manipulated the situation so some non-Muslims are pushing for the orthodox Muslims to get what they want.

This is not just happening in America, it is happening in free countries all over the world.

13. Bob keeps provoking a hostile overreaction from Dr. Marvin and then appears to be the innocent victim of Dr. Marvin's cruel insensitivity, and then he leverages that to gain concessions. If Dr. Marvin doesn't respond, Bob escalates or persists in his provocation until Dr. Marvin can't take it any more and bursts out in anger.

One memorable example from the movie is the dinner scene. Bob moaned with pleasure while he was eating. He kept moaning and saying, "This is so delicious!" And he kept it up until Dr. Marvin suddenly yells at him to shut up. All of Dr. Marvin's family looks at him with anger and embarrassment. Bob looks like the innocent victim of Dr. Marvin's irrational rage.

Here's a good example from William Bennett's Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism:

"From the beginning, the Palestinian strategy was, and still is, to provoke outrages to which Israel has had no choice but to respond with stringent countermeasures, thereby supplying endless footage of Palestinian casualties and eliciting fresh pressure by the West to accommodate ever-escalating Palestinian demands. Israel's commitment to peace stimulated in the Palestinians not a spirit of reciprocal amicableness but an appetite for more..."

14. Bob knows full well what he's doing, but successfully appears innocent to everyone but Dr. Marvin, who sees right through him but can't get anyone else to see it. Those of us who have been trying to alert our fellow Westerners to Islam's relentless encroachment are having a very difficult time.

Islam appears innocent to many people, and to them, we are suspect. We must be racists or bigots or Islamophobes. This assessment effectively shuts their ears to accurate information about something real enough to cause over seventeen thousand deadly attacks since 9/11.

15. Dr. Marvin clearly expects the problem (Bob) to go away, but he will never go. He keeps insinuating himself more and more thoroughly into Dr. Marvin's life. Almost every non-Muslim I talk to about Islam's relentless encroachment expects someone to take care of it and expects the problem to go away. But it isn't going away. It's getting worse. Orthodox Islam is insinuating itself more and more thoroughly into Western societies.

16. Bob is skillful, but conceals it. Dr. Marvin comes up with a brilliant scheme to admit Bob into a mental institution, but the institution can only legally hold Bob for 24 hours before they let him go. They can keep him there only if the staff agrees Bob needs to be institutionalized. Dr. Marvin is sure everyone will see Bob is crazy, but they don't. Within a few hours, they release Bob. Bob completely charmed the staff, telling jokes and cracking everyone up.

Like Bob, Islam is skillful, but conceals it. The more I learn about the clever infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into mainstream American life, the more impressed I am at the long-range planning and the skillful, sophisticated understanding of the American mind.

One branch of the Muslim Brotherhood is CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. They have successfully fooled most people in America that they represent moderate, peace-loving Muslim Americans. Read about what they are really up to.

17. Bob is in it for the long haul. Eventually, Dr. Marvin loses his mind, goes off the deep end, and he becomes violent and irrational, mainly because nobody else sees what Bob is really doing except Dr. Marvin.

Orthodox Muslims find every crack in the wall they can find and work their way in. And they twist every event and utterance to their purpose. They will not stop, they will not tire, and they have nothing else to live for. This is it. This is the meaning of their existence: Islam must win. Islam must dominate all other cultures, all other religions, all other governments. Allah wills it.

They have infiltrated our schools by giving donations to colleges and then using their seat on the board to exert influence (creating a campus culture of Islam-loving, America-hating students). Orthodox Muslims offered the British government and banks on Wall Street money to help them through the 2008-2009 financial crisis, but with strings attached — the money is "Shari'a compliant" which means, among other things, that there is a built-in written agreement that a certain portion of the money goes to particular charities — charities that support jihad against the West.

Orthodox Muslims have created "legitimate," mainstream organizations that lobby Washington and "represent the Muslim community" to governments and to the media, and yet have a secret agenda, revealed at the Holy Land Foundation Trial, of conquering America from within.

The list goes on and on. They are in it for the long haul, and they absolutely will not stop, ever. They won't grow tired or give up. If they are going to be stopped, we must stop them. And we had better do it with more success than Dr. Marvin had with Bob.

To get rid of Bob, out of mad frustration, Dr. Marvin tries to blow him up, but Bob ends up "accidentally" blowing Dr. Marvin's vacation home to smithereens, and then marries Dr. Marvin's sister!

Bob won. Dr. Marvin lost. We've got to do better.

Would you like to entertain yourself while watching a demonstration of orthodox Muslim techniques? Watch What About Bob?

And while you're watching, see if you can come up with ideas we can use. What would you do if you were Dr. Marvin?

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here. 

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Taqiyya — Religious Deception

The following is a chapter of Islam 101:

Due to the state of war between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, ruses of war, i.e., systematic lying to the infidel, must be considered part and parcel of Islamic tactics. The parroting by Muslim organizations throughout dar al-harb that "Islam is a religion of peace," or that the origins of Muslim violence lie in the unbalanced psyches of particular individual "fanatics," must be considered as disinformation intended to induce the infidel world to let down its guard.

Of course, individual Muslims may genuinely regard their religion as "peaceful" — but only insofar as they are ignorant of its true teachings, or in the sense of the Egyptian theorist Sayyid Qutb, who posited in his Islam and Universal Peace that true peace would prevail in the world just as soon as Islam had conquered it.

A telling point is that, while Muslims who present their religion as peaceful abound throughout dar al-harb, they are nearly non-existent in dar al-Islam. A Muslim apostate once suggested to me a litmus test for Westerners who believe that Islam is a religion of "peace" and "tolerance": try making that point on a street corner in Ramallah, or Riyadh, or Islamabad, or anywhere in the Muslim world. He assured me you wouldn't live five minutes.

{A} problem concerning law and order {with respect to Muslims in dar al-harb} arises from an ancient Islamic legal principle — that of taqiyya, a word the root meaning of which is "to remain faithful" but which in effect means "dissimulation." It has full Quranic authority (3:28 and 16:106) and allows the Muslim to conform outwardly to the requirements of unislamic or non-Islamic government, while inwardly "remaining faithful" to whatever he conceives to be proper Islam, while waiting for the tide to turn. (Hiskett, Some to Mecca Turn to Pray, 101.)

Volume 4, Book 52, Number 269; Narrated Jabir bin 'Abdullah: The Prophet said, "War is deceit."

Historically, examples of taqiyya include permission to renounce Islam itself in order to save one's neck or ingratiate oneself with an enemy.

It is not hard to see that the implications of taqiyya are insidious in the extreme: they essentially render negotiated settlement — and, indeed, all veracious communication between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb — impossible. It should not, however, be surprising that a party to a war should seek to mislead the other about its means and intentions.

Jihad Watch's Hugh Fitzgerald sums up taqiyya and kitman, a related form of deception.

"Taqiyya" is the religiously-sanctioned doctrine, with its origins in Shi'a Islam but now practiced by non-Shi'a as well, of deliberate dissimulation about religious matters that may be undertaken to protect Islam, and the Believers. A related term, of broader application, is "kitman," which is defined as "mental reservation." An example of "Taqiyya" would be the insistence of a Muslim apologist that "of course" there is freedom of conscience in Islam, and then quoting that Qur'anic verse — "There shall be no compulsion in religion." {2:256} But the impression given will be false, for there has been no mention of the Muslim doctrine of abrogation, or naskh, whereby such an early verse as that about "no compulsion in religion" has been canceled out by later, far more intolerant and malevolent verses. In any case, history shows that within Islam there is, and always has been, "compulsion in religion" for Muslims, and for non-Muslims.

"Kitman" is close to "taqiyya," but rather than outright dissimulation, it consists in telling only a part of the truth, with "mental reservation" justifying the omission of the rest. One example may suffice. When a Muslim maintains that "jihad" really means "a spiritual struggle," and fails to add that this definition is a recent one in Islam (little more than a century old), he misleads by holding back, and is practicing "kitman."

When he adduces, in support of this doubtful proposition, the hadith in which Muhammad, returning home from one of his many battles, is reported to have said (as known from a chain of transmitters, or isnad), that he had returned from "the Lesser Jihad to the Greater Jihad" and does not add what he also knows to be true, that this is a "weak" hadith, regarded by the most-respected muhaddithin as of doubtful authenticity, he is further practicing "kitman."

In times when the greater strength of dar al-harb necessitates that the jihad take an indirect approach, the natural attitude of a Muslim to the infidel world must be one of deception and omission.

Revealing frankly the ultimate goal of dar al-Islam to conquer and plunder dar al-harb when the latter holds the military trump cards would be strategic idiocy.

Fortunately for the jihadists, most infidels do not understand how one is to read the Quran, nor do they trouble themselves to find out what Muhammad actually did and taught, which makes it easy to give the impression through selective quotations and omissions that "Islam is a religion of peace."

Any infidel who wants to believe such fiction will happily persist in his mistake having been cited a handful of Meccan verses and told that Muhammad was a man of great piety and charity. Digging only slightly deeper is sufficient to dispel the falsehood.

Read about the Islamic doctrine that supports taqiyya.

Read a good example of taqiyya.

Read Bill Warner's, The Doctrine of Deceit.

Watch a good video on taqiyya.

Read an extensive article by Islam Watch entitled, Understanding Taqiyya ― Islamic Principle of Lying for the Sake of Allah.

Return to the Table of Contents of Islam 101

See a Glossary Of Islamic Terms for definitions. Islam 101 was written by Gregory M. Davis, author of Religion of Peace?: Islam's War Against the World, and the producer/director of Islam: What the West Needs to Know.

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An Example of Taqiyya

In the book, Terrorist Hunter, Rita Katz wrote about being at an IAP conference in Chicago. IAP is the Islamic Association for Palestine. There were lots of booths at the conference for "charitable" organizations, and at one of these booths, Katz met a man she already knew about: Muhammad Salah.

She pretended she didn't know who he was, and he introduced himself as a "Muslim human rights activist." Katz, a non-Muslim woman dressed as a Muslim, wrote, "He was small, thin, nearly bald. Totally harmless looking."

He told her these conferences were so important because "we can teach you about the oppression and sufferings of Muslims in America and all over the world." Then he told Katz his story. He had been a Palestinian with an American citizenship, a used-car salesman, working in Chicago when he went to Israel to "visit family and friends." But in Israel he was arrested by the Israeli authorities and thrown into prison for five years!

Katz looked appropriately appalled and asked why in heaven's name would they put him in prison? "Because the Israelis oppress innocent Palestinians," he said. "And do you know what is the most shocking part? When I returned to the U.S., after I was tortured and I thought I was going to die in that prison, the Americans placed me under investigation and froze my assets! Me, an innocent citizen, a car dealer, a family man, father of five!"

To any other non-Muslim this probably would have been a convincing story. The poor, oppressed Muslim! It's just wrong to treat people that way. Those Israelis must be very cruel. Those Americans are so oppressive to Muslims! But Katz was not an ordinary non-Muslim. She researched people like Salah for a living. She knew all about him. This frail, innocent-looking man was the leader of the worldwide military wing of Hamas, a brutal terrorist organization! When he was arrested in Israel he had a hundred thousand dollars in cash on him. In his testimony, he admitted the money was supposed to go to "members of Hamas's military wing." He displayed detailed inside knowledge of Hamas's structure and funding, and his testimony was later used as evidence in the New York trial of Musa Abu Marzook, the leader of the political bureau of Hamas (and the man who had appointed Salah to his position as leader of the military wing).

Katz writes: "Salah disclosed (in his testimony) that he'd been authorized by Marzook to recruit individuals for training in the uses of explosives to fight in the 'holy war.' In the United States, Salah began training ten such recruits, three of whom were chosen to carry out attacks.

In addition to supervising the building of bombs, explosives, and remote detonation devices, Salah was instructed by Marzook to develop biological and chemical weapons for Hamas."When Nasser Hidmi was caught trying to detonate a bomb in Israel, he said he had been chosen by none other than the poor, innocent, abused, oppressed Muslim, Muhammad Salah.

This is an example of taqiyya, the principle of religious deception. According to mainstream Islamic doctrine, Islam is in a permanent state of war with any non-Muslim who opposes the rule of Shari'a law. And in war, deceit is a legitimate tactic. In other words, as long as it helps the Islamic goal of making the whole world submit to Shari'a law, it is perfectly all right to lie and deceive.

When I was trying to figure out what I would choose as the three most important things to tell a non-Muslim about Islam, taqiyya was one of the three. The use of taqiyya is the main reason most non-Muslims are so confused about the real nature of Islam — they are constantly being intentionally deceived by orthodox Muslims posing as reasonable, "moderate" Muslims, who are thoroughly fooling everyone from political leaders to the media that "Islam is a religion of peace" and that "Islam has been hijacked by extremists." What they don't want non-Muslims to know is that Islamic teachings are highly political and it is a Muslim's religious duty to strive to accomplish Islam's primary political goal — the establishment of worldwide Shari'a law — in any way he can for his whole life.

Why wouldn't orthodox Muslims want non-Muslims to know this? Because they can make a lot more progress toward their goal if most of us are in the dark. But now you know. If you don't, read the Qur'an and find out for yourself. And then spread the word.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here.

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Conversation About Islam Conversations

I was talking to a friend about Islam, and I could tell he was thinking that I talk about Islam too much, so I said, "The reason I am so fascinated with talking about Islam is first, it's really relevant these days."

He interrupted me and said, "Yeah, I get that. It's definitely relevant."

"And," I continued, "the resistance people give me intrigues me. I've been an avid reader all my life. Only non-fiction. I don't even like reading fiction. I like learning stuff, and I enjoy sharing what I'm learning."

He nodded. To people who know me, this is probably one of the most obvious things about me.

"And all my life the reaction I've gotten from all the different things I've learned and shared has been almost entirely interest. Fascination even. Very rarely has anyone ever shown any kind of resistance to what I say. But on the subject of Islam, I had people arguing with me — people who didn't know anything at all about Islam. They would say, 'Christians do bad things too' — as if that has anything to do with anything!"

He laughed.

"I mean, I wasn't trying to justify Christianity by saying that about Islam!" He knows that I'm not a Christian, so he found this amusing. "But people say, 'the Crusades were bad too and not all Muslims are terrorists and the majority of Muslims are peace-loving people, and besides, what are you suggesting? That we go to war with 1.6 billion people?!'"

He smiled and said, "I think I said all of those to you!" He and I have had many conversations about Islam, and he has slowly started to wonder if Islam might be a bigger problem than he originally thought.

And I said, "I think there are a lot of reasons people respond this way. Of course it's scary. They don't want it to be true. And there are other things. It seems like picking on a minority. It seems like implying that we shouldn't have freedom of religion. It sort of seems like racism, but that's not right, of course, because Islam isn't a race. I think people just don't know how to deal with the information. And that has really intrigued me."

As it happened, the guy I was talking to is the one who recommended the book "Night" (which I've written about here). So I said, "That's what captured me so much about the book by Elie Wiesel — that old man that came back to the little town and tried to tell people what happened, and not one person believed him! That's so much like what has been happening about Islam. People didn't want to believe Islam's core doctrines are hateful and intolerant. They didn't want to believe that the founder of Islam owned slaves, raped women, tortured, assassinated and beheaded people, because the implications of such a terrible fact are too much. And besides, I know this Muslim and he's really nice — as if someone's niceness can tell you anything about a person's ideology. Ted Bundy was supposedly nice. Hitler was nice. Some lady just came out after all these years — she was his maid — and admitted that she thought Hitler was a really nice man!"

At this point, he seemed well won over, so I let the conversation drift into other topics.

The reason I share these conversations with you is because I think we all ought to be sharing our conversations with each other — especially when a conversation goes particularly well. I think it helps give us ideas about how to have these conversations so that they move the ball forward instead of those conversations that we've all had where we share information about Islam that seems like the ball moved backwards — like the person you're talking to is now even more against your point of view at the end of the conversation than the beginning. We need less of those, and more of the moving-the-ball-forward kind — even if it only moves the person just a little bit toward the ultimate acceptance of the painful and disturbing truth that Islam is at its heart intolerant, violent, misogynistic, and supremacist. Any given conversation doesn't have to bring someone all the way to that horrifying realization. But moving in that direction is good enough.

If you have a conversation like this, we want to hear it. You can post it on our web site: Talk About Islam Among Non-Muslims (and we read all the comments on that site) or you can email it directly to us here: Email CW. Let's help each other with these conversations.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here.

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Muhammad and the Genocide of the Jews

The following was written by F. W. Burleigh, author of the book, It's All About Muhammad, reprinted here with permission. Burleigh's biographical and historical information is based entirely on mainstream Islamic sources considered authoritative by Islamic scholars. 

If Muhammad were alive today, he would be put on trial for numerous crimes against humanity. One of the main charges against him would be genocide against the Jews of Arabia.

There are a number of incidents that make up the genocide accusation, but the chief among them was the beheading of anywhere from 400 to 900 Jewish men and boys, with 700 being the likely number of victims.

What pushed Muhammad to genocide was hatred. He hated the Jews because they rejected him and his religion, which was an amalgamation of Jewish and Christian and other religious beliefs. He claimed to be their prophet and insisted he was “commissioned” by Allah to restore the true faith of Abraham, but they laughed in his face. He was an Arab of Yemeni origin, not a Jew.

These crimes occurred in Yathrib, later known as Medina, and later extended outward to other Jewish communities. Yathrib, which at the time was half Jewish, became home to Muhammad after he fled Mecca, his town of birth. He barely escaped with his life after his compatriots decided they must kill him to keep him from destroying their way of life. His dramatic escape occurred in A.D. 622. At the time Yathrib was an agricultural valley with a population of 20,000. The Jews were distributed among three major tribes.

Muhammad thought the Jews would welcome him with open arms. He claimed to be a prophet of the line of Abraham, and in Mecca he had composed a number of Koran chapters having to do with the prophets, mostly of Biblical fame. He recited them to the Jewish rabbis of Yathrib as proof he was who he claimed to be. The Jews analyzed them and found his prophet stories were versions of derivative legends, not from the Bible, and so they rejected him.

While in Mecca, Muhammad had developed curse prayers — hate prayers — that he and his followers recited against the Meccans for rejecting him. He now turned his curses on the Jews. He branded them as apes and pigs and stirred up hatred against them in diatribes from the pulpit at his mosque. “They are mischief makers. They are fools. The Jews deny the truth,” he screamed on one occasion. (Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, p. 248)

He composed numerous Koran verses that seethed with the hatred he felt for the Jews for rejecting him. In verse after verse he warned them that hellfire awaited them for not believing in him. “Sufficient for the Jew is the Flaming Fire!” he said in Koran 4:55. In another he said, “There is a grievous punishment awaiting them. Satan tells them not to believe so they will end up in Hell.” (Koran 59:14)

When the Jews continued to resist him, Muhammad resorted to genocide. This began less than two years after he arrived in Yathrib. He and his growing corps of zealots attacked one of the Jewish tribes and after a two-week siege the Jews surrendered. Muhammad wanted to behead them all, but was talked out of it by one of the pagan allies of the Jews.

A year later, Muhammad forced the second of the three Jewish tribes to leave Yathrib, under penalty of death if they did not. He seized all of their wealth — fortresses, homes, date plantations, crop fields, and weapons — and distributed them among the elite of his followers from Mecca, but retained major properties for himself.

From his base in Yathrib, he was in constant conflict with the Meccans. He attacked their caravans, provoking an armed resistance. Muhammad and the Meccans fought two important battles, at Badr (A.D. 624) and Uhud (A.D. 625). A third came about two years after Uhud when the Meccans attacked Yathrib with a force of 12,000 men, but were stopped by a deep and lengthy trench Muhammad dug around the vulnerable areas of the valley. The last remaining Jewish tribe, the Qurayzas, whose territory was in the southeast corner of the sprawling valley, at first tried to remain neutral, then sided with the invaders, then changed their mind.

This misstep gave Muhammad the pretext to attack them. After the Meccan army left, Muhammad’s forces laid siege to the Qurayza fortress. Three weeks later the Jews gave up and begged Muhammad to allow them to leave. But he had been itching to mass murder the Jews for a long time. All of the men and adolescent boys, very likely about 700 in all, were force-marched to the interior of the valley to a compound near Muhammad’s mosque. The next day, he had a deep trench dug in the marketplace near the mosque. The Jews were led out of the compound five or six at a time. At the edge of the trench, they were forced to their knees and their heads were cut off. The heads and the torsos were thrown into the ditch.

Two of Muhammad’s first cousins, Ali, who later conquered Persia, and Zubayr, who died decades later owning $3 billion in gold alone (in today's dollars), did most of the beheading. At a rate of one victim per minute, it would have taken them almost 12 hours to kill that many people. Following the massacre, he enslaved all of the women and children, about 1,000 in all. He broke them up into five lots of 200 each. He kept two hundred for himself and sold two lots to two of the wealthiest of his Meccan followers. The rest he sent to slave markets in Syria where they were sold and the profits used to buy weapons and horses.

Violence is Muhammad’s legacy to the world. It is his Sunna, the example of his behavior in furtherance of “Allah’s cause,” which in effect means in furtherance of his cause of control, domination, and subjugation to impose his idea of God.

His idea of God was a reflection of who he was: hate-filled, vengeful, and without mercy toward people who rejected him.

His legacy continues today.

F. W. Burleigh is the author of It’s All About Muhammad: A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet. He blogs at www.itsallaboutmuhammad.com.

This article has also been posted on Inquiry Into Islam here.

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What's the Game Plan?

What are we doing on Citizen Warrior? What are we aiming for? It's a good idea to revisit this question from time to time.

Our main focus is on helping you, the reader, educate people you know about the problem of Islam.

The outcome we're aiming at is a population that is no longer fooled by the nonsense about Islam communicated in the media and by politicians.

This better-educated population will create a growing base of support for news outlets and politicians who speak honestly about Islamic doctrine. As Robert Spencer points out, right now "it is political suicide to speak honestly about Islam." We intend to create a condition where it is not political suicide. Once that happens, people everywhere will be emboldened to speak honestly about Islam in public.

Until enough people understand some basics about Islam, the public solutions supported by the general population will be ineffective.

This work is almost entirely one-on-one. The bulk of this education must happen between you and people you know. When the number of enlightened people reaches a critical point, the general awareness will expand rapidly as the media and politicians gain the courage (because of sufficient support) to educate the rest of the population.

That's the plan. The first step is to reach the people in your life who don't yet get it.

We post two kinds of articles on Citizen Warrior: Those you can share directly with people, and those that will help you more effectively (and more enjoyably) educate people about Islam's prime directive in your conversations with them.

For many of the posts to share directly, we will also post them on a more share-friendly site of ours called Inquiry Into Islam. Please subscribe to that blog and share those posts as they get published.

And we have many resources available to you already: Tools to Help You Educate Your Fellow Non-Muslims About Islam, most of which have been published in a manual.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here. 

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