The Devil We Don't Know

by Nonie Darwish

  While the U.S. government is busy doing “outreach” to, or appeasement of, the Muslim world that continues to terrorize us, it has neglected and ignored the feelings of many Americans, the victims of terror and the people whom government officials were elected to serve. The West's political vulnerability is compounded by its dependence on Middle Eastern oil and the petro-dollars in the hands of Islamic groups all over the United States, who use and abuse every opportunity called “outreach” that results from American naiveté.

  This is probably the first time in U.S. history when there are clear indications that the U.S. government and media are mistreating the American people in favor of a foreign entity. American officials, on one hand, support the building of a mosque near Ground Zero, despite the fact that it is contrary to what most Americans want, while, on the other hand, they denounce the use of the expression “Islamic terrorism” because it will hurt the feelings of Muslims. Clearly, this can be perceived as discrimination against the majority of Americans.

  President Obama and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg have humiliated and failed to appreciate the genuine feelings of many Americans. Some family members expressed their concern that calls for prayers, “Allahu Akbar,” will be heard from Ground Zero, which is the same cry the terrorists gave before slamming the airplanes into the Twin Towers. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf shamelessly called the mosque project “Cordoba” house, after the Islamic triumph in the Spanish city of Cordoba. Rauf and his ilk really think we are too stupid to figure out that he chose the word Cordoba to signify the triumph of Islamic jihad. He is an Islamist in sheep's clothing, calling himself “a man of peace” and grandiosely comparing himself to Mahatma Gandhi or President Anwar Sadat. It's a hollow expression, though, because we are all for peace. Rauf's deceit and double-talk were clear when his book was published in Malaysia with the title A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa [Proselytizing] in the Heart of America Post 9/11, while the same book was published in English under the title What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America.

  The sharia commandment for Muslims to lie, exaggerate, and slander has become second nature for Islamists such as Rauf. He and his wife and his supporters believe they can easily pull the rug out from under the feet of Americans, whom they think are too stupid to figure out who he really is.

  The second vulnerability to Islam that the West faces is cultural. What void does Islam fill in the West? Why are some Western women and men embracing Islam?

  When I first moved to the United States more than thirty years ago, two families on my street consisted of grandparents bringing up their grandchildren. This was quite unusual to me, and I was very curious to learn whether the parents were dead or disabled. When I discovered that the parents had been found to be unfit by the state, I was astounded. I had assumed that drug and alcohol addiction in the United States—the cause cited for these parents' unfitness—was mostly a juvenile problem, but to my surprise, it is widespread among adults, parents, and even grandparents. This reality in American society has produced many needy and vulnerable young people, a prime target group for Islamic proselytizing.

  People with alcohol and drug dependencies gravitate to controlling ideologies and systems of government that do not require much personal choice and responsibility. They seek a totalitarian authority that gives them benefits simply for keeping out of the government's way and for being obedient citizens, as long as they do not rock the boat. This kind of government is found in totalitarian socialist and Islamic countries that seek zombies and not alert citizens. Islam fits the needs of such vulnerable people.

  Some Western women feel alienated by the antimale feminist movement's promise they can have it all and don't need a man. In contrast, the Muslim man, dark and handsome, appeals to them like the prince on the white horse whom every young girl dreams of. He tells her he wants marriage, commitment, and for her to stay home and take care of the kids, while he works and handles the finances. Many segments of Western society have neglected women's hunger for a traditional family, and the promises of Muslim men suddenly sound very appealing to women who have a yearning for marriage and motherhood.

  I have received many e-mails from American and European women who converted to Islam following a love affair with a Muslim man, only to fall out of love a couple of years later after they had a couple of kids. The story keeps repeating itself, but the lesson we must learn from this is that America needs to nurture the natural tendencies of male and female and give more respect to the traditional family. The right to have an untraditional lifestyle does not have to clash with the desires of many women. America must find the right balance between these conflicting views about lifestyle choices without intimidating or insulting anyone.

  Although respect for Islam has been increasing in the United States, respect for Christianity and Judaism has been decreasing. American schools are inviting Muslim sheikhs and shady figures to teach Islam in high schools and colleges, while preventing Christian leaders from doing the same. Islam is taking full advantage of this multicultural vulnerability the United States has trapped itself in. We are creating a new generation of Americans who will have no respect for the culture, the religions, and the values that made America great, the country that many people cross oceans simply to live in. Americans should see the long lines of Muslims who are dying to move to the United States or any other Western country that will take them, to flee the tyranny of Islam.

  Today's American culture has also been unfair to men. Just look at all of the silly commercials on TV ridiculing the role of the man in the family, as they show a smart, thin, sexy wife with her fat, sloppy husband. To fix a fault, America tends to go to the opposite extreme, instead of finding a happy medium. In the case of the man, America has rejected his masculinity, ridiculed him, feminized him, and even abused him—all for the purpose of counteracting centuries of discrimination against women.

  Such an atmosphere produces vulnerable young American men who are looking for support for their male identity, and those are the people whom Islamists seek out. Islamic culture provides many channels for male friendship and bonding in fields beyond just sports. What appeals to Western men is that Islam tells them it is fine and even more advantageous to be male.

  To avoid being sucked into the stagnant and oppressive culture of Islam, America must end its destructive fighting with itself. The ultimate solution for the United States is to find the right equilibrium to bring together the traditional and the untraditional, the religious and the nonreligious, to pick the good values out of the old and the new, and never to prop up one group in order to punish another. That is the only way to create harmony in a society—by elevating everyone.

  There is nobility in cultures like that of the United States that promote respect for other cultures and strive to be fair to all minorities. No country in the world has accomplished that more than America has. Yet unfortunately, some influential segments of U.S. society take this to the extreme, at the expense of other vital segments of society. Multiculturalists want to see the United States as a bigger reflection of the United Nations building or the television series Star Trek, believing we can all live in perfect peace and harmony, while keeping our colorful, different exteriors, clothes, habits, and food. They believe we can always identify ourselves as members of a certain group, religion, or race, while rejecting assimilation into a common culture. That is exactly how America should be in their eyes. Otherwise, they believe it is racist and bigoted if it caters to the natural tendency of any culture to gravitate toward the comfort zone of a coherent homogeneous entity.

  Yet the standard that multiculturalists set for the less-developed world is different. Less-developed nations get a pass. These cultures can be as ethnocentric, proud, nationalistic, and supremacist as they want. Multiculturalists have allowed themselves a paternalistic controlling position toward ethnically unique cultures. Just like their concern for whales, they feel that less-developed cultures must be
preserved from the threat of extinction as endangered species. They love to visit remote primitive tribal cultures and make sure to take lots of photos of themselves with the indigenous inhabitants. Such primitive cultures are allowed to be as undiverse and unaccepting of the outside world as they want, because that simply adds to their charm.

  The Muslim rejection of, and effort to prevent, assimilation into Western culture thus makes perfect sense to multiculturalists. Islam by its natural instincts seeks to rise to power, thus multiculturalism has served Islam well and continues to serve its Islamist agenda—unless the United States regains its sanity before it is too late.

  I have a mental image of the goals of Islam in the West. Like Dracula, Islam seeks the submission of Western culture. It is slowly walking toward its new twenty-first-century victim; the victim is stepping toward Dracula in a hypnotic state and with a feeling of submission. It is tired of freedom and responsibility; it wants to embrace dependency on another. Where is the United States heading with its relationship with Islam? Will it end up like all of the great Middle Eastern civilizations that abandoned their innocence, growth, identities, languages, cultures, and values and submitted to the seduction of a clear-cut, black-or-white authoritarian state of submission? Will it accept a value system where the end justifies the means? Will the rebel bad-boy attraction of Islam win? I believe it is not too late and that we still have a chance to defeat all of these lures that Islam puts before us.

  The multicultural trap that is strangling the United States and Western civilization must be invalidated to allow America to breathe. The impossible expectation that we can remain diverse and still live happily ever after needs to be extinguished. That expectation is unrealistic, cruel, and self-destructive. Multiculturalists refuse to acknowledge that the United States, superpower or not, undergoes the same dynamics for survival that all cultures must go through. It needs a cohesive cultural identity to survive. Yet America continues to be used and abused by idealists who have a superficial view of human nature and cultural development. America must never become the victim of an unnecessary experiment.

  The United States must expose the devil it knows and the devil it does not know: the good twin and the bad twin of Islamic dualism. Muslims in the West are playing the game of good cop/bad cop with America. While one commits terrorist acts, the other says this has nothing to do with Islam. Yet the truth is that Islam is one and the same. The West must never buy into the propaganda of Islamist groups in the United States. It really does not matter who is hurting Western civilization, the good or the bad side of Islam—the violent jihadists or the stealth jihadists. Even Hitler must have had a good side, from someone's perspective. The devil we know and the devil we don't know are one and the same. America must never get entangled in Islam's orbit of no return.

  Will Islam continue to survive and thrive, or will it come crashing down on the weight of its own sword? Chapter 8 will delve into this.

  8

  House of Cards: The Downfall of Islam as We Know It

  Within the DNA of Islam is a self-destructive element: fear of the truth and a constant urge to fight those who value truth. Islam planted its own seed of destruction the day it relied on lies, violence, robbery, slavery, and rape for its expansion. For fourteen hundred years, Islamists have managed to suppress the truth about their religion to the majority of Muslims and have condoned acts of unspeakable injustices, violence, and torture by their prophet that must never be criticized under penalty of death. In the process, they have produced a morally confused and self-destructive culture that is incapable of withstanding challenges through honest debate or criticism. Challenging Islam with the truth brings out the worst in Muslim culture: shame, pride, envy, rage, lies, slander, violence, and terrorist acts. Muslims are educated to believe there is one solution for people who challenge Islam: “If you challenge my religion, I will kill you.”

  At its core, Islam is desperate for approval, and, as a consequence, it relies heavily on the outside world, seeking feedback that expresses respect, confirms its legitimacy, and even shows submission to Islam. If that is not received, all hell breaks loose with destructive acts not only toward the outside world, but also, strangely, against itself—Muslim against Muslim. Mohammed himself set the example for this dynamic when he not only destroyed those who rejected him, but also made enemies of Muslims who competed with him.

  Toward the end of his life, in 631 C.E., Mohammed actually ordered the destruction and burning of a mosque that had been newly built by a Muslim tribe that lived a few miles north of Medina in an area called Quba. The builders of the mosque invited Mohammed to honor the new mosque with his presence: “O Messenger of God, we have built a mosque for the sick and needy and for rainy and cold nights, and we would like you to visit us and pray for us” (Tabari IX:61). Yet instead of going to bless the mosque, Mohammed commanded his fighters to “go to this mosque whose owners are unjust people and destroy and burn it” (Tabari IX:61). Mohammed's fighters destroyed the mosque while worshipers were still inside, and, as usual, Allah approved of this action in a verse in the Koran (9:107–110) that justified Mohammed's violence against other Muslims. After the destruction of the mosque, Mohammed told the people in the area that they could pray in the mosque he had built there. Mohammed called his mosque “more virtuous” than the one he had destroyed. Although the reason he gave for destroying the mosque was that its builders were unjust rivals, his actual motivation was pure envy, distrust, and a need to be the only person who performed acts of benefit for the community.

  This was the example Mohammed set for what his followers should do if they did not like the actions of rivals—even if the rivals were Muslims. As a result, violence between Muslims reached epidemic proportions after Mohammed died. At least fifty thousand were killed in a single war over who would lead the caliphate. At that time, Aisha, Mohammed's widow, and her supporters, believed that Imam Ali was behind the murder of Othman, a companion of Mohammed and the third Caliph after Mohammed's death, and consequently fought Ali, Mohammed's only male blood relative, whose supporters believed he was the one entitled to head the caliphate. These wars and the resulting assassination of Ali were behind the Sunni and Shiite divide in Islam. Wars and assassinations became the destiny of the prophet's apostles (Sahaba), who fought and killed one another to determine the leadership of the growing Islamic empire. They followed Mohammed's advice when he said, “Whosoever of you sees an evil action, let him change it with his hand.” For several generations, every Muslim caliph was brutally killed by fellow Muslims over who should succeed the previous caliph.

  The Islamic dream to return to the caliphate—which Muslims envision as the ultimate ideal of a peaceful and blissful Islamic political system—has no basis in reality. It never existed during Mohammed's time or any other time after his death. The caliphate had a bloody history of pitting Muslim against Muslim, sect against sect, and engaging in revolutions and counterrevolutions, all in the name of Islam. That was then, and it is still the same way today—the Islamic political system remains dysfunctional. Sunnis and Shiites blow up each other's mosques today in Iraq and other areas; Saudi Arabia discriminates against Shiites and burns their Korans. The Islamic caliphate was never a peaceful and just state.

  Another factor that promoted rivalries, hatred, and violence among Muslim sects was a hadith by Mohammed. In it, he made a prediction that caused further divisions and accusations of apostasy between Muslims: “Seventy-two of the seventy-three Muslim sects will go to hell; only one of the sects will be in Paradise; it is the majority group” (Sunaan Abu Dawud, 3.40.4580). Mohammed never named that sect, but his prediction had devastating repercussions in Muslim relations, because each sect truly believed that the others would go to hell. Then and now, every sect of Islam accuses the others of apostasy, thus deserving to be killed. The result is an Islamic culture of no compromise and “I alone against the world.”

  Yet despite the hatred and animosity Muslim sects feel toward on
e another—and this is the paradox of Islam—all Muslims feel an obligation to present an image of unity, no matter how they feel toward one another. While instilling divisions and commandments to correct one another and reject the other's sins, Mohammed also commanded his followers to kill anyone who causes disunity: “Whoever creates disunity in the Islamic community, kill him” (Sunaan Abu Dawud, 3.40.4744). Mohammed did not clearly define disunity and left it in the hands of Muslims to be judge, jury, and executioner of those whom they believe are causing disunity among them. Thus, many Muslims today feel justified in interpreting calls for Western-style democracy in the Muslim world as causing disunity among Muslims. Because there is no central authority in Islam to decide matters of who is causing disunity and who is not, the commandment to kill Muslims who cause disunity can be interpreted by any sect as justification to act against the other. The bottom line is that this lack of clarity and conflict in what Mohammed commanded has caused a mess inside Muslim society, especially in its political system, leading to lawlessness and turmoil up until the present. Demonstrations, violence, and deaths continued to take place in Tahrir Square for months after the revolution.

  Islam's internal conflict emanates from Mohammed's own personal struggle at its inception. Islamic literature has documented in great detail how Mohammed suffered from bodily spasms, twitching, visions, uncontrollable lip movements, severe abdominal pains, sweating, fear, and anxiety, all of which led him to have suicidal thoughts. Mohammed's foster mother, Halima, brought him back to his biological mother and told her that he was possessed. When Mohammed was an adult, he suffered doubts about his own sanity, but his first wife, Khadija, told him that these were signs of his prophethood.1