They Say ‘Peace, Peace’ When There Is No Peace
With fanatic determination, radical Islam daily heaps one proof on another of the macabre nature of the popular slogan, “Islam is a religion of peace.” Incredibly, this soothing lullaby’s appeal only increases as greater evidence to the contrary mounts around a Western world that refuses to see.
The repetition of this naked lie by Western religious and political leaders in their attempt to keep oil flowing has gone far beyond political correctness and ecumenical delusion. It has become insanity obsessed with self-destruction.
We are fast approaching the point beyond which it will be too late to escape the tsunami begun by Muhammad. Overwhelmed by its giant waves of immigration and terrorism, the West will at last enjoy in its final destruction the very Islamic “peace” it has praised for so long. Only God can deliver us. But why should He rescue a proud, amoral Western culture that grows ever more brazen in its rebellion against Him?
When Muhammad first proclaimed, “Allah has commanded me to fight against all people until all confess that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is his only messenger,” he could not have imagined that Islam would ever be called a “religion of peace.” Islam began with Muhammad’s first murders in Jewish Yathrib (now Medina) of about 25 key opposition figures. The sword was Islam’s unmistakable trademark from its beginning. Plundering caravans and villages; enslaving women and children; and torturing, mutilating, and beheading the males who surrendered to the promise of peace (900 Jews at Yathrib, 2,000 Crusader knights at Caesarea, etc.) have been the modi operandi for “converting” the world to Islam that Muhammad and then his followers have used for some 1,300 years.
After Muhammad’s death (he was poisoned by the widow of a man he had murdered) in A.D. 632, much of Arabia tried to leave Islam, having been forced into it by the sword. But Muhammad’s edict (in obedience to Allah) that all who abandoned Islam were to be killed resulted in the slaughter of about 70,000 ex-Muslim Arabs during the Wars of Apostasy (632–634), fought to “reconvert” Arabia.
Muslim Against Muslim
Islam’s endemic violence soon reaped its inevitable fruit as Muslims turned on one another in the many wars they fought among themselves to establish the first caliphates. Three of the four “Rightly Guided Caliphs” who succeeded Muhammad were murdered. In the process of establishing their vast empire, Muslims killed more than 100,000 fellow Muslims within a few years after Muhammad’s death.
Conversion-by-conquest of “pagans” soon left a bloody trail of unrivaled destruction, slaughter, and slavery from France to China. Muslims killed more in India alone than Hitler killed in Europe, North Africa, and Asia. The same misguided zeal to convert by force drives radical Islamic terrorism today.
Scarcely a Muslim regime today is not ruled by a dictator who seized power from other Muslims. There have been more revolutions, political assassinations, and terrorist acts in Muslim countries, Muslim against Muslim, than in all the rest of the world combined. Just in the short period from Israel’s independence to the Yom Kippur War (1948–1973), there were 80 revolutions in the Islamic world (30 successful), including the murder of 22 heads of state.
During its entire history, except for isolated pockets here and there, Islam has never brought peace. The 14-year revolution in Algeria has cost more than 110,000 lives. In Afghanistan, Islam has ruled for centuries without bringing peace. And the country would erupt in civil war between rival warlords were Western troops to leave.
Dealing With the People of the Book
Islam’s “peace” lies in either death or subjection, with two sup-posed exceptions: Christians and Jews, whom the Qur’an calls “the people of the book,” meaning the Bible. To the demand “convert or die,” a third option was added: people of the Book might pay the exorbitant jiziya tax and live as dhimmis under Muslim “protection,” with virtually no rights.
Islamic persecution, enslavement, and periodic slaughter of professing Christians have rivaled the treatment of Jews. In Spain, where Islam was “the most humane,” the garrison of Muez was slaughtered in A.D. 920; Pamplona was put to the sword in 923; then followed Cordova, Zaragoza, and Mereda, with all adult males killed and women and children enslaved. During the 400-year rule of the Ottoman Turks, Christians lived in daily fear of murder, rape, torture, and genocide—as they still do today in most Muslim countries.
In A.D. 635 the Christians of Damascus were beheaded when they surrendered, and their churches were burned to the ground. So it was with the nearby Christian village of Qara, where all adults were massacred and children enslaved. When the Christians of Acre asked for the privilege to properly bury the Damascus-Qara dead, the Muslims marched to Acre and slaughtered every Christian they could find along the coast. In 1403 some 700 large villages and small towns were massacred and all Christian churches razed. At Sivas, 4,000 Christians were buried alive. At Tus there were 10,000 victims. About 100,000 were killed at Saray, 90,000 in Baghdad, and 70,000 in Isfahan. We can only recite a small fraction of such massacres. The Nestorians and Jacobites of Mesopotamia never recovered.
The terror and slaughter of the Ottoman Christians (Greeks, Syrians, Lebanese, et al.) is beyond description, including the massacre of more than 1 million Armenians. The destruction by Ataturk’s army of Christian Smyrna in September 1922 (some 200,000 murdered) is a tale of indescribable cruelty and horror told in the book The Blight of Asia by U.S. General Consul George Horton, an eyewitness. In its foreword, James W. Gerard, former U.S. ambassador to Germany, described Horton’s book as “the whole story of the savage extermination of Christian civilization [by Muslims] throughout the length and breadth of the old Byzantine Empire.”1 Horton said this extermination was “carried on…with fixed purpose,” and systematically involved “painstaking minute details” and “unspeakable cruelties.”2
Fundamental Islam has not changed. Most of us remember watching Muslim mobs around the world dance for joy in the streets and shouting Alahu Akbar (“glory to Allah”) when the World Trade Center’s towers came down in New York City on September 11, 2001. However, the footage was quickly taken off Muslim TV.
Christians Under Islam
After Islamic cleric Sheikh Youssef al-Badry deceptively stated on Egyptian television that “in some cases a Muslim may leave Islam,” 24-year-old Mohammed Hegazy made history by filing suit against Egypt for refusing to recognize his and his wife’s conversion to Christianity. Muslim clerics quickly countersued, and an outraged public demanded the young couple be beheaded, as Islam requires. Yet forced conversions of Christians to Islam are an almost daily occurrence, and young girls are kid-napped off the streets and forced into Islamic marriage.
Last year Theresa Ghattas was missing for three weeks. She had been imprisoned in a Cairo apartment and forced to “convert” before reappearing with a Muslim family, wearing the full veil. Recently 19-year-old Ingy Nagy Edwar disappeared after boarding a bus. She reappeared in court wearing an Islamic veil, forbidden to speak to parents and family who were ordered never to contact her again. Many similar examples could be given.
While boasting that Christians have freedom, Egypt requires the “express permission” of its president for any repairs to a church. In fact, no permissions have been granted in the 25 years of Hosni Mubarak’s presidency. Having unsuccessfully sought such permission for more than a year, a church in upper Egypt repaired a desperately needed toilet. The church was heavily fined, and authorities demolished the toilet.
In April 2007 in the central Turkish town of Malatya, one German and two Turkish employees of the Zirve publishing house that distributes Bibles endured three hours of intense torture, hands and legs bound, before their throats were slit. Scores of similar attacks on Turkey’s small Christian minority (1 percent of the population) continue. Hoping to join the European Union, Turkish authorities officially condemn such crimes, but they never criticize Islam.
In Islamic Uzbekistan, raids continue against home fellowships. Leaders and families (including children) are being arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and fined. After Daniel, an 11-year-old Christian living in Toba Tek Singh, Pakistan, was beaten by Muslim friends for not playing with them, Daniel’s parents confronted the Muslim family (a dangerous mistake). The family called the police and falsely claimed Daniel had blasphemed Muhammad. Daniel’s Christian family now faces a heavy fine, possible life imprisonment, or the death penalty. In November 2006, Shahzad and Saraj Bashir, 18 and 20 years old, were kidnapped and held prisoner by their employer and tortured to “convert” to Islam. Managing to escape, they have since moved far away.
In contrast, since its takeover of Bangladesh in January 2007, the military interim government has begun to convict and even execute Muslims guilty of murdering Christians. Yet in August 2007, in Bangladesh’s Nilphamari district, recently baptized converts to Christ were kidnapped and forced back into Islam under public threats of violence. Their means of income is cut off, their cooking utensils are forcefully taken, their homes are vandalized, and their lives are threatened. Yet they are offered jobs and other rewards to return to Islam.
The above is a small fraction of the persecution and martyrdom Christians suffer today at the hands of Muslim fundamentalists.
Scripture teaches that faith in Jesus Christ alone brings salvation: “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Let us pray and do all we can to get the gospel to these people, since they are held in bondage, afraid to believe on the Christ who alone can liberate them to follow the path of true peace that His death has bought at infinite price.
ENDNOTES
- James W. Gerard, foreword, The Blight of Asia <ellopos.net/politics/turkey-blight/foreword.asp>.
- George Horton, introduction, The Blight of Asia <ellopos.net/politics/turkey-blight/foreword.asp>.
