Life experience is one of the greatest teachers we human beings have available to us. Generally, that means that each one of us has the capacity to learn based on what we experience in life.
For example, the more time we have after experiencing a horrific act to reflect upon it, the greater our wisdom should be in dealing with possible future horrible acts of the same nature that occur in the future. At least, that’s the theory.
While that may apply to individual wisdom, I have found that it increasingly does not apply to the big, or rather, gargantuan mechanism of the American government and the Leftist power brokers of Western culture. The latest manifestation of that is the realization that America has fully surrendered and is now aiding the very terrorists who helped facilitate and empower the deadly attacks on 9/11/2001.
Moreover, we have been aiding those we designated as our enemies since the so-called “War on Terror,” was declared. It began with a denial of who the enemy really was then and is today, and now has virtually granted them the victory by default and promises of further material aid!
We refused to see the enemy at the start of the “War on Terror”
The “we” referred to here were not the people of America. Rather it was the “leadership” of America who, despite the evidence, refused to recognize that the enemy was not the vague ‘terrorist’ but the very specific Islamic terrorist.
This was demonstrated less than a week after 9/11/2001 in a speech by none other than President George W. Bush. In that speech, Bush declared that Islam was a “religion of peace,” and put great emphasis on the idea that the terrorists who attacked America did not do so on behalf of Islam.
This is despite the fact that throughout the history of Islam, its adherents, i.e. Muslims, grew their numbers by the conquest of non-Muslim people which is appropriate according to their guidebook, The Quran. It is also despite the fact that Islamic holy war, aka Jihad, has been waged against western civilization for centuries by military and terrorist actions around the globe.
Even if one discounts the history as a whole (which is a mistake), one needs to look no further than the celebration of the 9/11 attackers among so-called ‘Palestinian’ Muslims right after the attacks.
There were celebrations at Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, following the attacks on the Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Palestinian men, women and children chanted in jubilation after terrorists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center causing them to collapse on Tuesday morning.
Moreover, the celebrations didn’t represent merely the views of a fringe group of Palestinians. A poll four years after the 9/11 attacks found that 65% of Palestinian respondents supported “Al Qaeda bombings in the USA and Europe.
Among those respondents were a strong contingent of the Islamic terror group “Hamas.” They have long had a hostile presence in the West Bank and Gaza and are adamantly anti-Israel and anti-America in their sentiments.
The phrase being shouted by these celebrants is “Allahu akbar,” which means “God is great.” It is also the same phrase shouted by every Muslim terrorist in every Jihad-style attack perpetrated everywhere in the world.
What America refused to recognize was that while all Muslims are not Jihadists, all Jihadists are Muslims. That failure at the very beginning meant we were engaged in the battle against a fanatical enemy with at least one hand tied behind our backs because we didn’t recognize the enemy’s motivation.
The enemy is motivated by the tenets of Islam
There are various names that both Leftists and Conservatives in political and cultural arenas have tried to pin on America’s enemies that came to prominence on 9/11. The Left eschews any mention of Islam as connected with the attacks (more on that in a bit), while Conservatives typically use names such as “Muslim extremist,” or “radical Islamist terrorist” to characterize the enemy.
However, those labels imply that the Jihadist attacker is somehow going beyond the bounds of Islam when engaging in terrorist action or military attacks. I believe the most accurate name for those people is “Islamic fundamentalist” because they are following the fundamental tenets of their religion.
From that document came the “Five Pillars of Islam” the primary of which teaches,
Faith (iman) in the oneness of Allah and the finality of the prophethood of Muhammad (indicated by the declaration [the Shahadah] that, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah”).
It existed only as manuscript bits until some time after Muhammed’s death in 632 A.D.
According to Islamic teaching, the Quran came down as a series of revelations from Allah through the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, who then dictated it to his followers. Muhammad’s companions memorized fragments of the Quran and wrote them down on whatever was at hand, which were later compiled into book form under the rule of the third Caliph, Uthman, some years after Muhammad’s death.
Here I will caution the reader that if you just pick up an English translation of the Quran and try to read it, it won’t make a lot of sense because it is not organized by event or topic. Rather it is organized into “Suras” according to the length of the chapter with no connection to when they were written.
Moreover, it is organized around an interpretive principle known as “abrogation,” which means that writings revealed the latest in time that conflict with or contradict earlier revelations overrule those earlier revelations.
The Quran itself lays out the principle of abrogation:
2:106. Whatever a Verse (revelation) do We {Allah} abrogate or cause to be forgotten, We bring a better one or similar to it. Know you not that Allah is able to do all things?
This essentially means that whatever Muhammed wrote toward the end of his career would overrule anything that conflicted with what he had written earlier because Allah said so. Unfortunately, it is those later “revelations” that provide the motivation for violence and slavery to be inflicted upon all non-Muslims.
In order to find out what the Quran says on a given topic, it is necessary to examine the other Islamic sources that give clues as to when in Muhammad’s lifetime the revelations occurred.
The earlier Suras of Muhammed’s time were mostly generalized and peaceful in nature. His later ones were not.
[Sura] 9:5, commonly referred to as the “Verse of the Sword,” revealed toward the end of Muhammad’s life:
9:5. Then when the Sacred Months (the 1st, 7th, 11th, and 12th months of the Islamic calendar) have passed, then kill the Mushrikun {unbelievers} wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and prepare for them each and every ambush. But if they repent and perform As-Salat (Iqamat-as-Salat {the Islamic ritual prayers}), and give Zakat {alms}, then leave their way free. Verily, Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.
So when Jihadists crashed the planes into the Twin Towers, they weren’t practicing anything extreme to Islam. Rather they were obeying the tenets of their religion, the orders of their “god.”
Sharia Law is the worldwide goal of our enemy
Sharia law is a term that is also often misunderstood, deliberately or otherwise. It has most recently been used in declarations by the Taliban, who once again rule Afghanistan.
Understanding that Sharia is the goal is also the key to understanding the Jihadist mindset of the enemy. What does Islam teach concerning Sharia’s mandates?
Because Sharia originates with the Quran and the Sunnah, it is not optional. Sharia is the legal code ordained by Allah for all mankind. To violate Sharia or not to accept its authority is to commit rebellion against Allah, which Allah’s faithful are required to combat. There is no separation between the religious and the political in Islam; rather Islam and Sharia constitute a comprehensive means of ordering society at every level. While it is in theory possible for an Islamic society to have different outward forms — an elective system of government, a hereditary monarchy, etc. — whatever the outward structure of the government, Sharia is the prescribed content. It is this fact that puts Sharia into conflict with forms of government based on anything other than the Quran and the Sunnah.
The Jihadist mindset is one seeking to establish Sharia as universal law regardless of the objections of any nation and by force if necessary because they are being faithful to Islam when they do so. You see, though the word “Jihad” means struggle, it has both an inward and outward aspect in Islam.
The inward aspect is the struggle to be faithful in the heart to Allah. The outward aspect is to struggle to establish Allah’s Sharia throughout the globe by any means required, violent or otherwise.
That is the ultimate goal of the enemy that attacked America on 9/11. Our leadership, by and large, didn’t understand that then and they don’t today.
The misnamed “War on Terror” was doomed from the beginning because of this colossal mistake. It just took 20 years for our surrender to be complete as manifested in the Afghanistan debacle.
Moreover, even after Afghanistan, there remain those in power deluded by the idea that Islamic Jihadists are not a threat and should not be implicated at all in the 9/11 attacks on America. Witness this nonsense from the Education Department of Virginia concerning what should be taught in public school about 9/11 on its 20th anniversary.
Virginia’s Department of Education hosted a speaker who instructed teachers to exclude the role Muslim extremism played when teaching students about 9/11. In a PowerPoint delivered by “Education Leadership scholar” Amaarah DeCuir, teachers were instructed to avoid using language that could pin the events of 9/11 on Muslim extremism. …DeCuir created a list of teaching standards that are “in” and “out,” according to her viewpoints. Teaching standards that are “in” include “acknowledgment of anti-Muslim racism.” Teaching standards that are “out” include the “false assumption of Muslim responsibility for 9/11” and “American exceptionalism.”
Why did America surrender to and even embolden the Islamic terrorists in the “War on Terror”? Because we steadfastly refused to condemn the “Islamic” ideology of terror and call it out as the evil it is.
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Isaiah 5:20 [ESV]
D.T. Osborn
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