Deadly Mistake: Stop Equating Islam to Other Religions

The Religion Barrier
America’s Extreme Vulnerability to Islam

This is a reprint of a stunning article by the late George Mason of the 6th Column Against Jihad.

Americans could lose their struggle against Islamic Jihad or be forced into an extreme, mutually destructive war if they do not correct their most serious and most under-recognized vulnerability. This is the vulnerability non-Islamic Americans share and can be called their “religion barrier.” It means that they accord Islam the same respect that they accord Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc., simply because Islam is a religion. Americans need to reprogram this aspect of their thinking in order to see Islam for what it is and to be able to deal with it definitively.

Americans’ religion barrier permeates our culture.

Here is a paragraph of President George W. Bush’s commencement address to the Air Force Academy, on 3 June 2004, illustrating the problem:

“History is once again witnessing a great clash. This is not a clash of civilizations. The civilization of Islam, with its humane traditions of learning and tolerance, has no place for this violent sect of killers and aspiring tyrants. This is not a clash of religions. The faith of Islam teaches moral responsibility that ennobles men and women and forbids the shedding of innocent blood. Instead, this is a clash of political visions (emphases mine).”

This short passage fully captures this very serious and potentially fatal flaw in American thinking, and take note–meaning well but staying ignorant will get us all killed.

Let us set some context for understanding the problem and then correct it.

The “Cloaking Device” That Islam Is

Islam is a global movement, the goal of which is to bring every living human being on the planet under its crushing totalitarian rule, the likes of which has never before been seen. Some of Islam is obvious and easy to identify. Some of it, however, lies beneath the surface, like an iceberg. The true nature of Islam sports a remarkable disguise.

No other movement, not even Fascism or Communism, has been so determined to conquer the world and rule with such rigid, detailed, complete control over the day-to-day activities of the lives of everyone on the planet. Islam has a multi-pronged plan in place to accomplish this goal, and it is being implemented with increasing success throughout the world. Islam seeks to make the rest of the world become just like it: squalid, backward, and primitive.

Wherever it interfaces with populations it has not yet conquered, Islam destroys buildings, blows up men, women, and children, and imposes tight controls on people’s lives. Islam is nihilism personified. Most of the world’s wars and conflicts are due to aggression caused by Islamists, fueled by Islam’s evil doctrines. Islam brainwashes its own children, as well as the children of the conquered, in order to assure that future generation will continue to carry out Jihad. This has been going on for 1400 years, yet the movement remains unopposed in any meaningful way anywhere in the world to this very day.

Why is Islam meeting with so little effective resistance?

The most important reason for its success today is that it has a very clever “cloaking device.” It calls itself a “religion.” The evils of Fascism and Communism, the one passively allowing Christianity, and the other openly rejecting all religion, were much more visible to the world. These clearly political movements were content to call themselves just that: “Political movements.” They did not attempt the intellectual fraud of calling themselves “religions.”

For most of the world’s population, a religion is an institutionalized set of beliefs relating to the divine, and its purpose is to act as a spiritual guide in the personal lives of its followers. Most of the world’s religions embrace, at least to some degree, the laissez-faire attitude of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Judaism and Christianity do not serve as action plans for world conquest; their sacred documents are not war manuals that describe some of the cruelest, most inhumane strategies and tactics ever devised; they receive no divine marching orders to bring the world’s population into submission.

Most of us subscribe to the principle that whatever philosophy we choose as roadmaps for our lives, be it related in some way to a divine source or not, is a matter of our personal choices. We can talk to each other about the pros and cons of each other’s belief systems; we can try to persuade each other to adopt our views. That is where it ends. Force plays no role here. For Islam, there is just one acceptable religion and way of life: Islam. Force is indispensable to the implementation of Islam’s agenda.

Since Islam claims about one billion adherents, it is often called one of the “three great religions,” along with Judaism and Christianity. Americans, accepting Islam as one of the big three, accord Islam the same respect they give to Judaism and Christianity.

I once shared some of these confusions about Islam. Stripping Islam of its “cloaking device” that makes it fully visible to everyone has made it easier for me to see Islam clearly. For example, I feel no self-consciousness about thinking about Islam divorced from any association with a deity. Freed, I cannot stand by, seeing so many good, patriotic Americans utterly paralyzed in so much of their thinking about Islam, simply because they cannot cross this “religion barrier.”

How Americans View Religion

What blinds religious Americans to the realities of Islam? Part of the answer lies in how they regard religion per se.

From early childhood, most Americans are taught that religion is a personal matter and not a subject of polite conversation (unless you know someone well enough to know that you will not tread on toes by having such a discussion). You learn that religion must be accorded “special handling” and that religion is “above criticism.” By the time they reach adulthood, many people have developed a powerful aversion to regarding any religion as anything other than basically good. It goes like this: Religion is good; Islam is a religion; therefore, Islam is good.

Muslims exploit this Achilles heel in Americans. Groups such as the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) follow the pattern of the civil rights industry. Any whiffle of critical questioning or criticism of Islam brings the cheap suits of CAIR to full throat. As a result, many critics of Islam, infected with political correctness, back down. Were they secure in their positions, critics would stand up to these pressure groups to defend their values. Islamic pressure groups, meanwhile, masterfully exploit the confusion by playing this “religion card,” along with racial, cultural, and immigrant cards, all of the current tools of “victimism.”

Jihadists wreak death and destruction over and over, in a global “ring of fire” all around the world, wherever Islam meets non-Islam. Their fellows create mayhem inside America, paralyzing its citizens with doubts about their relationship with Islam. They do it for Allah and Islam. In the sense that Muslims get away with their bullying and their demands for special treatment, privileges, and unfair, undeserved advantages, it all means that we are not only accepting but reinforcing Muslim bad behaviors and assertions. This makes us our own worst enemy.

The goal of Islam is to force all of the world’s people to submit. “Submission” is the meaning of the word “Islam.” Submission will be accomplished through force or by voluntary conversion. (I must add here the extremely powerful attraction of Islamia to Nazism when the latter “flowered.”)

For this reason, we need to close off all avenues exploited by Islamists, from immigration to deception to intimidation. But, before we can do that, we must strip Islam of its “protected” status as a “religion” in the minds of good Americans.

Can Islam Pass Evidence Tests?

(1.) Sources of Islam

A billion believing Muslims do not make Islam true just because they believe it. Muslims believing that Islam is a religion must provide some evidence for their claims to have any credence. They point to the Koran and the books of the Sunnah, as though these books offer self-evident proof of their assertions. Few have ever called Islamists’ bluff to show how these same books actually totally invalidate Islam rather than substantiate it.

Islam is the complete fabrication of a man named Muhammad, who lived in the seventh century A.D. Muhammad was an illiterate who proclaimed that Allah revealed Islam to him through the Angel Gabriel. How do we know? Muhammad said so. That’s it: He said so! Millions of Muslims have surrendered their lives to the soul-destroying Islam solely on a say-so. Judaism and Christianity have done far, far better than this to substantiate their faiths to their believers.

You and I could do what Muhammad did. We could make up some documents and sermons, proclaim them to be revelations from a deity, give components special names, and declare all of it a religion. It would be true because we say it is true. Our ad hoc religion has exactly the same validity as Islam’s claims. If huge numbers believe us and accept our religion, does it make it true? Of course not. Islam gets its credit as a religion because so many people believe in it. If a billion people believe in the Religion of the Great Pumpkin, do their large numbers make it true?

I cannot improve on the proof of Islam’s fraudulence more than that provided by Craig Winn in his new book, Prophet of Doom (Cricketsong Books, 2004). He makes a complete case, using founding documents of Islam and objective scientific research sources. Ibn Warraq’s outstanding book, Why I Am Not a Muslim, makes the same case but uses a different, equally valuable approach. Together, they are unassailable.

Qusayy, Muhammad’s great, great, great grandfather, was a pagan, of course. He ran a religious scam in Mecca, which centered about pagan Arabs’ worship of pre-Islamic gods in the rocks of the Kaaba, the large cube in the allegedly holiest spot in Mecca. One of the pagan gods at the time of Qusayy was named “Allah” (“god” in Arabic is a different word, “ilah,” which sounds quite a bit like “Allah” to our ears), sort of like “Joe” or “Sam.” Allah was one of 360 gods. He wore three hats. He was a moon god whose special interest was agriculture, as well as a god of the sword and war. He was selected as Muhammad’s favorite because of the last two hats. His symbol was the crescent moon, a familiar sight atop many a minaret.

Qusayy was the Meccan “conventioneer par excellence,” promoting and controlling the ceremonies, rituals, and all activities of pagan Arabs coming to Mecca on Hajj (yes, it was going on with exactly the same rituals many decades before Islam) to worship the stone gods of the Kaaba. He ran concession stands, facilities for room and board, transportation, and regulated rituals, procedures, and all access to the Kaaba. This religious scam was Qusayy’s livelihood at least 80 years before Muhammad was born, and it was apparently profitable. Even Qusayy invented little; he used the customs, practices, and superstitions of the tribalists. Qusayy’s genius was in his conventioneering.

After Qusayy died, his family inherited Qusayy’s Meccan religious scam. Muhammad, a sort of adoptee, was kept out of inheriting any of the business by Qusayy’s descendants. In time, Muhammad took Qusayy’s “five pillars” Kaaba concession from his descendants by force. He then claimed these practices and sites as original to his own invention, which he named “Islam,” and he cemented his position by having his soldiers annihilate anyone who objected. He kept the black stone god, Allah, and used the sword to ban all the other pagan gods. (POD, page 94) “Allah and the Kaaba predated Muhammad by five generations. He didn’t invent them. Nor did he conceive the pagan rituals, fairs, holy months, fasts, prostrations, taxes, and pilgrimages that made these things worth owning.”

Muhammad initially had a series of gods. His first god was nameless. His second god was named “Ar-Rahman,” which he used interchangeably with “Lord.” Later, he used “Lord, Ar-Rahman, and Allah.” Allah shows up as Mohammad’s sole god much later, in his final phase in Medina, after he had already become a full-blown terrorist.

Only Muhammad ever “heard” any of Allah’s “revelations” and gave only his say so as evidence of these revelations. The entire Koran is only what he said it was.

Muhammad was illiterate. His deity made “revelations,” which conveniently appeared whenever he wanted something, including the wives of others, booty, or death sentences. Muhammad made up Islam as he went along, changing what he claimed was the “unchangeable word of his god” to fit current needs and “abrogating” earlier, usually more benign, revelations from the same alleged god. His claim to be a prophet was just that, his claim, having not a shred of evidence, much less proof.

(POD, p.58) “Islam was derived in part from an offshoot of the religious scam concocted by Nimrod in Babylon” (POD, p107). “Islam isn’t the religion of Abraham or the doctrine of the prophet Muhammad. It is the religion of Qusayy.” You can read it for yourself, in the founding documents of Islam, or in modern synopses, or in the masterful collection in Prophet of Doom.

Another Islamic lie is that Allah revealed the Koran in Arabic so that “knowledgeable Arabs” could understand it. At the time of the illiterate Muhammad, Arabic was a language still in its infancy in its birthplace in Syria. It did not achieve widespread use in Arabia, where Mohammad lived, until a century or two after Muhammad’s death. Few, if any, in Muhammad’s time knew any Arabic. So few knew any reading or writing at all that none of the Koran was written for decades after the death of Muhammad. Instead, it was transmitted orally, which was a strong tradition among illiterate people. Certainly, none of it was ever written by Muhammad, who was illiterate, like so many of his fellows. There are claims that some followers wrote verses on leaves and the like — not the sort of material likely to survive for long periods. Nothing of the sort whatsoever survives, with little wonder.

The language question is just one of a seemingly infinite number of questions casting doubts on the validity of the Koran as it has been purported to be. Even more, questions cast doubt on all of the rest of Islam.

Might there have been a few other Muslim cooks making up the stew of Islam? Following stunningly successful conquests by Arabs of what used to be large portions of the Roman Empire, Islamic clerics collected and codified the Quran and other Islamic doctrines. (POD, p. 100) Until the Koran was first written some 100 years after the death of Muhammad, and for the next 200 years after that, Islam existed only as oral traditions, fashioned to retain some material, eliminate others, and to add yet other material to get the desired result, which we now call Islam (POD, p. 61). “[T]he Islamic clerics in Baghdad who fleshed out the Quran in the eighth century attempted to make it seem more religious by usurping myths and fables from the Talmud, uninspired Jewish folklore.” “Every Islamic doctrine and ritual existed before the Quran, Muhammad, or even the first Muslim graced our world. As Ishaq [Muhammad’s first biographer, about 120 years after Muhammad’s death] has correctly explained, Islam was practiced in all of its glory before the Islamic prophet was born.” (Emphasis mine.)

Koranic errors, lies, and contradictions run rife; other Islamic founding documents fare just as poorly. Islam gets away with it for two reasons. The first reason is that Islamists proclaim the Koran and supportive works to be the Word of Allah, thereby making any change blasphemous and punishable by death (stoning, beheading, whatever). The second reason comes from the power of Islam to shut down all inquisitiveness in its believers, who are made to fear to think.

(2.) Muhammad

Muhammad himself was a thoroughly evil man. Quoting Prophet of Doom (p. 3), “He became a pirate, dictator, and terrorist leader. He used Quranic scripture to justify horrific behavior: pedophilia, incest, rape, torture, assassinations, thievery, mass murder, and terror, all in an unbridled orgy of sex, power, and money.” This picture of Muhammad comes from the founding documents of Islam. Nobody has to make up anything. The founding documents themselves tell all.

Once he had gathered enough followers, Muhammad changed from evangelist to conquistador. He was a barbaric savage, claiming Islam as the authority for his behavior. He was the first “Islamic terrorist,” and he set the standard which Islamists follow to this day.

Muhammad competed with his contemporaries, Maslamah and Zayd, who preached the pagan Hanif doctrine in the local culture. Hanif was almost identical to Islam; Muhammad incorporated these beliefs whole-cloth into Islam, even stealing Zayd’s poetry. Muhammad became the dominant prophet after winning a huge battle in which he destroyed his competition.

He lived among Jews and spent a lot of time interacting with them prior to killing them. He “lifted” liberally from their traditions. Islam plagiarized big-time from Judaism and the Bible and capitalized on their terms, such as God, Prophet, Angel Gabriel, Satan, Heaven, and Hell. Islam has never been more than “Judeo-Christianity-Lite” at best.

Every time he wanted something, Muhammad said that Allah gave him the “revelation” that authorized his actions. Muhammad made up each and every one of these alleged revelations. One authorization allegedly given Muhammad by his “Allah” was for wife stealing, later topped off by his marriage to a six-year-old girl. This wonderful fellow, however, waited until she was nine to consummate the marriage. Does this Muhammad remind you of Jesus and his Apostles or of the great leaders of Judaism?

(3.) Jihad

Jihad was created by Muhammad to justify his power lust and that of his followers. He justified his terrorism as the most efficient means of spreading the faith. Remember, Islam exists solely to justify terror and bloody conquest by its adherents. To this day, it faithfully retains its original agenda and all the means it adopted to implement it. It exists unchanged since its invention almost 1400 years ago.

Muhammad intended for “Jihad” to be a bloody instrument of conquest, looting, and enslaving. He led many genocidal missions. His personal cut of the booty was 20%, which he said Allah “told him” to take. He ordered murder on a wholesale basis which Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could only hope to emulate centuries later. Mohammad’s life was a horror story on the grandest of scales.

In the West, Islam gets away with so many lies (deception is an official weapon in the Islamic war chest) because so many Westerners remain so ignorant about it. Too few pick up the easily available, well-written materials which shine the spotlight of truth on Islam. For example, if anyone wants a “quick fix,” read Ibn Warraq’s Leaving Islam. This book presents “real-life stories” from those who left Islam. No one could begin to make up for the real difficulties these people endured. This book is a great start to understanding Islam.

Says the Prophet of Doom, “While the Islamic holy books aren’t historically reliable, they are Islam, not a version, interpretation, or corruption of Islam, but the essence of the religion. Muhammad can be no different than those books depict him.”

Here, then, is a summary of some of what we know about Islam thus far:

1. “Allah” is a proper name. It is not the translation of the Arabic word for “God.” Allah never existed as a supreme deity, then or now. He was a pagan moon-sword-war god in the pagan Arab pantheon that existed long before Islam was invented, and he “lived” in a black rock, in the Kaaba.

2. Allah did not “reveal” the Koran to Muhammad; Muhammad made it all up. Muhammad was not Allah’s apostle or prophet. The reason he claimed revelations from an omnipotent deity was to grant himself the moral authority to act as his narcissism demanded.

3. Muhammad stole every bit of what eventually became “Islam” from various existing sources in local culture and ineptly plagiarized the Jewish Talmud, Jewish religious documents and practices, and the Christian Bible. At best, Islam is Judeo-Christianity-Lite.

4. The SOLE evidence for the validity of Islam comes from Muhammad’s own mouth.

5. All of the founding documents of Islam were written from 100 – 300 years after the death of Muhammad, and all came from oral sources. Despite what Muslims believe, these founding documents raise many doubts about their authenticity, validity, and “holiness.”

6. Muhammad created Islam as a means to achieve power over Arabia and to plunder it; he also used it as a means to effect revenge on those who opposed him. Muhammad was one of the bloodiest terrorists and conquistadors in history. He acted out all of his profound evil in the name of his creation “Islam” and called the process “Jihad.”

7. Islam is a political movement and a scam, a con game, run by clerics and warlords for their personal profit and to keep and expand their power base.

What we really know about Islam is that it is a set of lies, confabulations, and above all, justifications for totalitarianism. It is immensely attractive to those who feel incompetent and lack self-confidence because it provides them a psychological and moral “exoskeleton,” superficially masking their inadequacies. It is as alien to the spirit and teachings of most other religions as though it had come from an extraterrestrial source. If it did not have the 1400 year history of acceptance by millions of adherents, it would be held in the contempt and ridicule it deserves and summarily discarded by all humans who become aware of it. The success of its continuing presence and influence comes from how Islam is culturally transmitted, a story for another time.

How do Judaism and Christianity deal with criticism of their faiths? They offer arguments in their defense. They do not issue “fatwas” against the critics (a “fatwa” is a religious edict with the power of law).

How does Islam take criticism? It does not. Official doctrine condemns critics to death. In some cases, Islamists provide the non-Muslim critic with an opportunity to convert to Islam. If he refuses, he may be condemned to death. If the critic is a Muslim, then criticism brings him death. No one is allowed to question the truth of Islam, even where contradictions are obvious. One must accept, submit, believe, or face horrendous, Koranic-style punishment.

Islamists regard “good Muslims” as those who are fully consistent practitioners of Islam. Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia and Khomeinists from Iran are the best of these “good Muslims.” All other Muslims are considered evil because they do not practice Islam consistently. Therefore, they are as many targets of the “good Muslims” as Americans, and other infidels are.

What does Judaism or Christianity do when one of their faithful renounces his or her faith? The Church or Synagogue attempts to persuade, or even pressure, the person, friends, and family to stop this person from becoming an apostate. They may disown or shun him. In the long run, however, apostasy has no more impact than dropping a magazine subscription. Such is not the case for Islam: If you renounce Islam, you are condemned to death. This is not negotiable. This is Islam, the Islam that tries to call itself a “religion.”

Naming Islam for What It Is

Let us make the emotional leap, a leap that is really a small, intellectual step: Stop regarding Islam as a “great religion,” worthy of your protection from scrutiny and criticism.

Call it a religion, if you must, because it uses your religion’s language and has many believers. But, recognize it for the political evil that it is and its unremitting agenda of worldwide conquest. Your life, the lives of your loved ones, the existence of your country, and of all your values depend on it. You will never be able to stop Muslims and their apologists from proclaiming Islam to be a great religion. They will always demand that you respect it and give it a blank check. You cannot reason with them, so stop trying. Reason only with yourself and other rational human beings. Stop buying into Muslim psychopathology.

Start calling Islam what it is.

Call it a toxic ideology, a death cult, even your death sentence. In fact, Islam, among other things, is a vicious political movement, which gives itself a mantle of respectability and gets away with its actions only by providing itself with the “cloaking device” of religion. Islam is totalitarianism. It wants to conquer you and kill you and yours. It wants to destroy everything you value.

If you do not withdraw your sanction of Islam, you will play right into the Islamists’ hands. This is happening right now at the highest level of government. We watch our highest officials bowing and scraping to their future Muslim killers while reassuring our people that Islam is peaceful, that Islam is a great religion, that Islam is wonderful, and worst of all, that Islam has been hijacked by some bad guys who twist it to their uses. Don’t be played like a Wurlitzer. Islamists are selling you sanitized Islam while practicing the real thing. It is terribly important to remember that lying and deceit are among Islam’s most valued weapons.

Jump over the religion barrier. Keep your own peaceful religion, which teaches that the initiation of force is wrong, but that self-defense is right. Recognize and reject Islam, which has as a central commandment to erase the Infidel — that’s you — from the face of the earth.

This reprint was originally posted at the Religion of Peace.