Douglas Murray on Islam and Violence, And How the BBC Cravenly Self-Censored When a "Moderate" Muslim Went Berserk Upon Mention of Asma Bint Marwan

A very, very revealing story that is told toward the end of this Spectator piece by Douglas Murray that appeared on 17 January.  The whole thing is worth reading – and I urge anyone whose interest is piqued, here, to click on the link and read it in situ, and then set aside an hour or so to peruse the many Comments. But it is the bit at the end that should, I hope, inspire many, many irate letters to the BBC, on the subject of the downright-criminal suppression of information.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9416542/religion-of-peace-is-not-a-harmless-platitude/

‘Religion of Peace’ is Not a Harmless Platitude

‘To face Islamist terror (sic: rather, “to defend ourselves against the Jihad” – CM) we must face the facts about Islam’s history’.

‘The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault.

After each bloody Muslim attack. – CM

‘In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have “nothing to do with Islam”.

‘It was said by George W Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7, and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month.

‘It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists (sic: two British-passport-holding Muslims, converts to Islam – CM) cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of aid worker Alan Henning in the ‘Islamic State’, and when Islamic extremists (that is: zealously-Muslim allahu-akbaring Muslims – CM) attacked a Kenyan mall, separated the Muslims from the Christians, and shot the latter in the head.  

‘And, of course, it is what President Francois Hollande said after the massacre (the Muslim massacre – CM) of journalists and Jews in Paris last week.

‘All these leaders are wrong.

‘In private, they and their advisers often concede that they are telling a lie.

‘Often’. Who, precisely, Mr Murray, is making this concession, and how often? And what point are you or someone else with similar ‘access’ going to break ranks and tell us all, in public, out loud,  just who, precisely, has privately acknowledged that all these bleatings of “nothingtodowithIslam” bleating are…deliberate lies? – CM

‘The most sympathetic explanation is that they are telling a ‘noble lie’, provoked by a fear that we – the general public – are a lynch mob in waiting.

‘We – the general public” – being of course, “all we non-Muslim citizens of those non-Muslim lands now afflicted by aggressive, expanding, dangerous and hostile Muslim colonies; we who find ourselves being ever more frequently and ever more violently and murderously attacked by…allahu-akbaring Muslims.” – CM

‘Noble’ or not, this lie is a mistake.

And that’s putting it politely. – CM

‘First, because the general public do not rely on politicians for their information, and can perfectly well read articles and books about Islam for themselves.

Which we are doing; more and more of us, all over the western world and beyond the West – in places like western and eastern Africa, and Inda – are doing it, each and every day; and thanks to the internet we can share our findings, and hasten the illumination and self-education of others. – CM

‘Secondly, because the lie helps no-one understand the threat we face.

It does not merely ‘not help’. It hinders. Because although – as he has just pointed out – many Infidels have been going off to do their own research, the fact is that there are others – too busy, or incurious, or not ornery-minded enough – who do meekly swallow what they are told by their leaders, and by the media, and therefore do not even think of attempting a little self-educaiton. – CM

 ‘Thirdly, because it takes any heat off Muslims to deal with the bad traditions in their own religion.

The blasphemy law and the apostasy law are the things that stifle self-critique among Muslims; not what some 21st century Infidel politician says or does not say. – CM

‘And fourtly, because unless mainstream politicians address these matters then one day perhaps the public will overtake their politicians to a truly alarming extent.

Why  is that prospect”alarming”?  If enough of us ‘get’ the truth, fast enough, then from among our number we will be able to identify and elect into office politicians who will know the facts, tell the truth, and do something practical about defending us all against the Jihad – and in particular, against the Jihad that is waged by the massive Muslim Fifth Column now installed in most infidel lands world-wide.  All I care about, Mr Murray, is that the word spreads. Somehow. As fast as possible. – CM

‘If politicians are so worried about this secondary ‘backlash’ problem then they would do well to remind us not to blame the jihadists’ actions on our peaceful compatriots (but just how peaceful are those Muslims in our midst, the ones who in effect “human shield” and run interference for the murderous jihadis who emerge from and melt back into hiding amongst them, those Muslim families and Islamified suburbs with all those Muslim schools and mosques? – CM) and then deal with the primary problem – radical Islam – in order that no secondary, reactionary problem will ever grow.

Mr Murray needs to read Conor Cruise O’Brien, “The Lesson of Algeria: Islam Is Indivisible”.  Mr O’Brien begins thus: “”Fundamentalist Islam” is a misnomer which dulls our perception in a dangerous way.  It does so by implying that there is some other kind of Islam, which is well disposed to those who reject the Koran. There isn’t.”

And just for fun, let’s rewrite that paragraph, with Mr Murray’s chosen adjective ‘radical” substituted – as it perfectly well can be and in writings by other journalists and academics often is – for the adjective “fundamentalist”.  “”Radical Islam” is a misnomer which dulls our perception in a dangerous way.  It does so by implying that there is some other kind of Islam, which is well disposed to those who reject the Koran. There isn’t.”   Mr Murray, you are very brave, and very smart, and you are telling more of the truth than most other people are right now; but even you perhaps need to reread Mr O’Brien, and see what is possible. – CM

‘Yet today our political class fuels both cause and nascent effect.  Because the truth is there for all to see.

‘To claim that people who punish people by killing them for blaspheming Islam while shouting “Allah is greatest” (sic: but ‘Allahu akbar’ means, strictly speaking, so I am told by others who know, ‘Allah is greater’, i.e. greater than any other divinity or belief system; it is a boast, a threat, and a declaration of comparative superiority – CM) has “nothing to do with Islam” is madness.

Yes.  True dat.  Madness. – CM

‘Because the violence of the Islamists is, truthfully, only to do with Islam; the worst version of Islam, certainly, but Islam nonetheless.

Correction: “Because the violence of the Muslim assassins is, truthfully, only to do with Islam.”  That is all  Mr Murray needed to write. – CM

‘Last week, a chink was broken in this wall of disinformation when Sajid Javid, the only Muslim-born member of the British cabinet, and one of its brightest hopes (sic: “one of its brightest hopes”…really???!!!! I do not think that any fully Islamoinformed Briton is inclined to see much ‘hope’ in the ever-more-numerous Muslim faces in Parliament, no matter how smilingly-apparently-‘moderate’ they may appear for the moment to be – CM) dipped a toe into this water.

‘After the Paris attacks, he told the BBC, “The lazy answer would be to say that this has got nothing whatsoever to do with Islam or Mulsims and that should be the end of that. That would be lazy and wrong”.

‘Sadly, he then proceeded to utter the second most lazy (or, in fact, most brazenly deceitful – CM) thing one can say: “These people are using Islam, taking a peaceful religion and using it as a tool to carry out their activities”.

Mr Murray, he said that? and you just called this man “one of the brightest hopes” in the British Cabinet? Good god. – CM

‘Here we land in the centre of the problem – a centre we have spent the last decade and a half trying to avoid: Islam is not a peaceful religion.

Well!  Finally he spits it out.  The next step, of course, is to go with Jacques Ellul, who in his foreword to Bat Yeor’s tome ” The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam”, said bluntly, of Islam as such, considered generally, that it is “fundamentally warlike”.  Or with Winston Churchill, who in the first chapter of his book “The Story of the Malakand Field Force’, defined Islam as “the religion of blood and war”, and who also, in his 1931 speech, “Our Duty in India”, made the following observation – “While the Hindu elaborates his argument, the Moslem sharpens his sword.”  It is not simply that Islam is ‘not peaceful’.  Islam is the religion of blood and war, orders of magnitude more so than any other religious system currently still extant on planet earth. – CM

‘It is certainly not, as some ill-informed people say, solely a religion of war.

Write me down as ill-informed, then, Mr Murray; I’m in good company, right along with Winston Churchill, and Jacques Ellul, and Conor Cruise O’Brien, and for that matter, Joseph Schacht, who knew more about Islam than either you or me and, in his “An Introduction to Islamic Law”, stated flatly that “The basis of the Islamic attitude towards unbelievers is the law of war. They must be either converted, or subjugated, or killed”. – CM

‘There are many peaceful verses in the Quran which – luckily for us – most Muslims live by.

Until and unless they deem it no longer necessary.  In The Times, September 8, 2007, journalist Andrew Norfolk wrote an article about ‘one of the world’s most respected Deobandi scholars’, one ‘Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani’, who in a book called “Islam and Modernism” “argues that Muslims should live peacefully, in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practise Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle”.  They must “live in peace until strong enough to wage jihad”.  And before that, in 2004, there was one Hamza Yusuf, a convert to Islam, who at a conference in Dubai adduced the example of Mohammed’s treacherous ‘treaty’ with the non-Muslims of Mecca and advised his Muslim hearers that “There are times when you have to live like a sheep in order to live in the future like a lion.”  It strikes me that, right now, in 2015, all over the world, previously apparently-quiescent Muslim ‘communities’, having bided their time and established themselves in sufficient numbers and influence, are phase-shifting from ‘lie low and play nice’ ‘Mecca mode’ to openly-aggressive ‘Medina mode’ – from ‘sheep’ to ‘lion’…some of them very rapidly indeed. – CM

‘I say this not because I hate Islam, nor do I have any special animus against Muslims, but simply because this is the verifiable truth based on the texts.

Well, I agree with Mr Murray about the violence in the Islamic texts.  I have to say, though, that – precisely because of that incredible and ubiquitous violence – I do hate Islam. The more I see of it, the more clearly I see it as a total and totalitarian death cult that has caused an incalculable amount of human death and suffering in the course of its flagrantly, gleefully, ritually murderous path through 1400 years of history, a path marked by rivers of blood and mountains of skulls.  I place it right up there alongside the child-sacrificing cult of Moloch, the Aztec human sacrifice system, and the Thuggees.  And I classify it also, because of the dhimma, as a crime syndicate or protection racket. And then there’s its enthusiastic endorsement and practice of slavery, past and present, including the worst form of slavery, sex slavery, with even very young children, toddlers and infants, as the victims.  Being a Christian, I pray daily for the liberation of Muslims from their death cult, and rejoice over every publicly-declared apostate; but if Muslims wilfully persist in Islam, and if they insist on attacking infidel men, women and children and as a result get killed by infidel military or law enforcement, I will not weep for them. They got what they chose. – CM

‘Until we accept that we will never defeat the violence, we risk encouraging whole populations to take against all of Islam (but would that be such a bad thing? really? I’m sorry, Mr Murray, but “all of Islam”, as far as I am concerned, is a dud, and deadly, and I want it far, far away from me and mine – CM) and abandon all those Muslims who are trying desperately to modernise, reform, and de-literalise their faith.

I think, right now, speaking as a citizen of the ever-more-imperilled Free World, I would rather focus on vigorous self-defence, than waste any of our energy on the frankly impossible attempt to ‘reform’ Islam.  A part of our self-defence should, of course, involve protecting and giving a voice to the declared apostates, such as Magdi Cristiano Allam and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq and Wafa Sultan and Sam Solomon, those who have ditched Islam altogether and joined the Camp of the Infidels.  CM

‘And, most importantly, we will give up our own traditions of free speech and historical inquiry and allow one religion to have an unbelievable advantage in the free marketplace of ideas.

‘It is not surprising that politicians have tried to avoid this debate by spinning a lie.

‘The world would be an infinitely safer place if the historical Mohammed had behaved more like Buddha or Jesus.

‘But he did not and an increasing number of people – Muslim and on-Muslim – have been able to learn this for themselves in recent years.

‘But the light of modern critical inquiry which has begun to fall on Islam is a process which is already proving incredibly painful.

For different reasons. It’s a shock for many nice modern westerners to find out that Muslims revere and are supposed to assiduously emulate the dastardly deeds of a murderous slave-trading warlord.  Muslims, on the other hand, have always known this perfectly well; what they object to right now is non-Muslims finding out and, as a result, becoming justifiably wary of the Muslim colonies in their midst. Increased non-Muslim knowledge of the deplorable conduct of Mohammed the warlord might lead to non-Muslims deciding they would rather not have mosques and Muslims in their countries, thank you very much. And that might put a spanner in the works of the hijra process – the immigration-invasion – that has been, up till now, going swimmingly. – CM

‘The “cartoon wars” – which began when the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published a set of cartoons in 2005 – are part of that. But as Flemming Rose, the man who commissioned those cartoons, said when I sat down with him this week, there remains a deep ignorance in the West about what people (sic: Muslims – CM) like the Charlie Hebdo murderers wish to achieve. And we keep ducking it. As Rose said, “I wish we had addressed all of this nine years ago”.

Or ten years ago, after the Muslim murder of Theo Van Gogh on November 2 2004, in Amsterdam. – CM

‘Contra the political leaders, the Charlie Hebdo murderers were not lunatics without motive, but highly-motivated extremists (sic: pious well-instructed Muslims – CM) intent on enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws in 21st century Europe.

‘If you do not know the ideology – perverted or plausible though it may be – you can neither understand nor prevent such attacks.

Correction: “If you do not know the ideology you can neither understand nor prevent such attacks.” – CM

‘Nor, without knowing some Islamic history, could you understand why – whether in Mumbai or Paris – the Islamists (sic: Muslims – CM) always target the Jews.

‘Of course, some people are willing to give up a few of our rights. There seems, as Rose says in his book on the Danish cartoons affair, The Tyranny of Silence, some presumption that a diverse society requires greater limitations on speech, whereas of course, the more diverse the society, the more diverse you are going to have to see your speech be.

‘It is not just cartoons, but a whole system of inquiry which is being shut down in the West by way of hard intimidation and soft claims of offence-taking.

In other words: by the jihad of the sword and the jihad of the tongue, or pen. The Muslim assassins threaten and attempt to murder and in fact murder people; and after each attack, whether thwarted or achieved, the smiling ‘moderate’ Muslims smilingly and plaintively insinuate that the victims brought it all on themselves by causing ‘offence’. And so, by the goodcop badcop game, the Ummah considered as a whole ‘grooms’ this or that society, and indeed the whole western world, for dhimmitude.  – CM

‘The result is that, in contemporary Europe (and not only in Europe, but just about everywhere else as well – CM) Islam receives not an undue amount of criticism, but a free ride, which is unfair to all other religions.

And now we come to the part of this article that matters most of all, and that should be spread far and wide. – CM

‘The night after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities I was recording a Radio 4 programme.  My fellow discussant was a very nice Muslim man who works (or says he works…-  CM) to “de-radicalise” extremists.

‘We agreed on nearly everything.

‘But at some point he said that one reason Muslims shouldn’t react to such cartoons is that Mohammed never objected to critics.

‘There may be some positive things to be said about Mohammed, but I thought this was pushing things too far, and mentioned just one occasion when Mohammed didn’t welcome a critic.  Asma Bint Marwan was a female poetess who mocked the “Prophet” and who, as a result, Mohammed had killed.  (And Mr Murray could have mentioned other mocking poets, Kab Bin Asraf, and Abu Afak, who met a similar fate, on Mohammed’s orders and with Mohammed’s hearty approval – CM).

‘It is in the texts. It is not a problem for me.

‘But I can understand why it is a problem for decent Muslims.

‘The moment I said this (that is: the moment Murray related the story of what Mohammed had done to Asma Bint Marwan – CM), my Muslim colleague went berserk.

‘How dare I say this?  I replied that it was in the Hadith, and had a respectable chain of transmission (an important debate).

‘He said it was a fabrication which he would not allow to stand.

‘The upshot was that he refused to continue unless all mention of this (that is: all mention of the entirely-Islamically-canonical story of Asma Bint Marwan – CM) was wiped from the recording.

‘The BBC team agreed and I was left trying to find another way to express the same point.  The broadcast had this “offensive” fact left out.

And there, dear readers, is something that should be going into many an irate letter to the BBC; with relevant extracts from the canonical Islamic texts, the sahih Hadith and the Sira of Ibn Ishaq, included, in full.  – CM

‘I cannot imagine another religious discussion where this would happen, but it is perfectly normal when discussing Islam.

Time to break ranks, Mr Murray.  You have just given us a most illuminating description of one specific, concrete instance of a public broadcaster giving in to a Muslim tantrum – and, therefore, to implicit Muslim threats of violence – and suppressing information, vital information, information that would enable the public to form a just opinion of current events.  It appears, from what you have just said, that this is not the only instance. What other footage – audio, or video, or both – has been tossed down the memory hole at the behest of irate Muslims, Muslims who appeared nice, and ‘moderate’, and smilingly besuited but who, when certain details of Mohammed’s career, or teachings, or both, were mentioned on camera, suddenly went…berserk?  And would it not be good, next time you go into an interview where this sort of thing is liable to happen, to carry, concealed on your person, a tiny little recording device, so that you can keep – and later produce – your own record of what transpired, including the five or ten minutes that got edited out by the censors?  – CM

‘On that occasion I chose one case, but I could have chosen many others, such as the hundreds of Jews Mohammed beheaded with his own hand.

‘Again, that’s in the mainstream Islamic sources.  I haven’t made it up.

‘It used to be a problem for Muslims to rationalise, but now there are people trying to imitate such behaviour in our societies it has become a problem for all of us, and I don’t see why people in the free world should have to lie about what we read in historical texts.

‘We may all share a wish that these traditions were not there but they are and they look set to have serious consequences for us all. 

‘We might all agree that the history of Christianity has hardly been un-bloody.  But is it not worth asking whether the history of Christianity would have been more bloody or less bloody if, instead of telling his followers to “turn the other cheek”, Jesus had called (even once) for his disciples to “slay” non-believers and chop off their heads?

‘This is a problem with Islam. – one that Muslims are going to have to work through. (But what if they don’t – or what if most of them don’t –  want to? What if they don’t see a problem with it, in the first place? – CM) They could do so by a process which forces them to take their foundational texts less literally, or by an intellectually acceptable process of cherry-picking verses.  Or prominent clerics could unite to declare the extremists non-Muslim.

But they can’t, because the so-called “extremists’ are…perfectly good Mohammed-imitating Muslims. – CM

‘But there isn’t much hope of this happening.  Last month Al-Azhar University in Cairo declared that, although ISIS (Islamic State) members are terrorists, they cannot be described as heretics.

Indeed they cannot.  They are plain old orthodox Sunni Muslims, and Al Azhar is a fount of Sunni Muslim orthodoxy. – CM

‘We have spent 15 years pretending things about Islam, a complex religion with competing interpretations.  (Beginning with the Sunni -Shiite internecine warfare…though both Sunnis and Shiites are quite agreed about what should be done to the filthy nonbelievers, to Jews and Christians and HIndus and so-on and so forth. – CM)  It is true that most Muslims (how many is ‘most’? – CM) live their lives peacefully.  But a sizeable portion (around 15 percent and more in most surveys) follow a far more radical version.

That is, they take Islam fully to heart; they are committed to the imitatio Mohammedi. – CM

‘The remainder are sitting on a religion which is, in many of its current forms, a deeply unstable component.

Understatement of the year. – CM

‘That has always been a problem for reformist Muslims.  Who have usually met sticky ends. – CM

‘But the results of ongoing mass immigration (of Muslims – CM) to the West (and why was that mass immigration of Muslims even considered, even permitted, in the first place? and why should it be assumed that such mass immigration of Muslims will continue? Does not the whole of the preceding portion of Mr Murray’s article offer good and sufficient cause why all immigration of identifiable Muslims into the West – or into any majority-Infidel country anywhere – should be stopped, as quickly as possible? – CM) at the same time as a worldwide return to Islamic literalism (that is: a worldwide Muslim revival, a revival of Islam pur et dur – CM) means that this is now a problem for all of us.

It would be less of a problem if all Muslim immigration into any non-Muslim land were stopped. Now. And if all Muslims who have gone from western lands – and other infidel lands – to wage jihad with Islamic State, were stripped of their passports and citizenship status, and  prevented from ever being able to return. – CM

‘To stand even a chance of dealing with it, we are going to have to wake up to it and acknowledge it for what it is.”

As I said above: click on the link and read the article in situ, where you will be able to read the many, many comments. The Defenders of Islam, whether Muslims or dhimmified Islamophilles, are out in force, but they are not being allowed to have it their own way.

But what matters most of all is Mr Murray’s account of his exchange with the apparently-moderate Muslim who went simply berserk at the very idea that the Great British Infidel Public might be allowed to know about what Mohammed had done to Asma Bint Marwan; and the craven groveling of the BBC who acceded to that Muslim’s imperious demand. – CM