FrontPage Magazine

The full impact of Western intervention in Libya was recently highlighted during a televised interview of Worlds Apart. Hanne Nabintu Herland, a Norwegian author and historian who was born and raised in Africa for 20 years, was the guest.

At one point while talking about Libya, Herland firmly asserted that “In a just world, the political leaders in the West, that have done such atrocities towards other nations and other cultures, should have been sent to the Hague [International Criminal Court], and judged at the Hague, for atrocities against humanity.”

Before that, the African-born, Norwegian author said:

Libya is the worst example of Western countries’ assault in modern history; it’s a horrible thing to be a European intellectual and to watch your own political leaders go ahead and engage in something like this. In Norway, for example, when it comes to something like the Libyan war … [political leaders] sent SMS messages to the other people in parliament; it was never a discussion in parliament, it was an SMS saying “Let’s bomb because someone called from America.” We [Norway] bombed 588 bombs over roads, and water, and cities in Libya at that time. And we had a large documentary in Norway, after that, where the fighters, the pilots that flew over Libya and dropped these bombs, they actually said in the documentary that “We were sent up and we weren’t even told what to bomb—just bomb something that looks valuable.

Herland also pointed out that, according to UN figures, Gaddafi’s Libya was once the most prosperous nation in Africa. While Oksana Boyko, the host, sometimes disagreed with Herland, she agreed about the West’s counterproductive role, pointing out that Gaddafi “was very active in trying to advance women’s rights, he brought a lot of women into universities and the labor force [a thing few people in the West know, as usual, thanks to the “MSM”] and now what people and women in Libya are facing is Sharia [Islamic law], with the possibility of some of them being sold to ISIS fighters as virgin brides.”

Indeed, that the jihadis and other “ISIS” type militants gained the most from Western intervention in Libya cannot be denied. Simply looking at the treatment of Christian minorities—the litmus test of the radicalization of any Muslim society—proves this.

Thus, today, Monday, January 12, “A Libyan affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has claimed the abduction of 21 Coptic Christians and released pictures of the captives.” It is not clear if these 21 are in addition to the 13 Christians kidnapped days earlier on January 3.

Then, around 2:30 a.m., masked men burst into a housing complex in Sirte, Libya. The militants went room to room checking ID cards to separate Muslims from Christians, handcuffed the latter and rode off with them.

(Segregating Christians from Muslims is a common procedure around the Islamic world. For example, last November, after members from the Islamic organization Al Shabaab hijacked a bus carrying 60 passengers in Kenya, they singled out and massacred the 28 non-Muslim passengers, the Christians. In October 2012 in Nigeria, Boko Haram jihadis stormed the Federal Polytechnic College, “separated the Christian students from the Muslim students … and then proceeded to shoot them or slit their throat,” killing up to 30 Christians.)

According to Hanna Aziz, a Copt who was concealed in his room when the other Christians were seized in Libya, “While checking IDs, Muslims were left aside while Christians were grabbed…. I heard my friends screaming but they were quickly shushed at gunpoint. After that, we heard nothing.”

Three of those seized were related to Aziz, who mournfully adds, “I am still in my room waiting for them to take me. I want to die with them.”

A few days earlier, also in Sirte, Libya, a Christian father, mother, and young daughter were slaughtered reportedly by Ansar al-Sharia—the “Supporters of Islamic Law,” or the Libyan version of ISIS that rose to power soon after the overthrow of Gaddafi.

On December 23, members of the Islamic group raided the Christian household, killing the father and mother, a doctor and a pharmacist, respectively, and kidnapping 13-year-old Katherine. Days later, the girl’s body was found in the Libyan desert—shot three times, twice in the head, once in the back (graphic images here).

As for motive, nothing was stolen from the household, even though money and jewelry were clearly visible. According to the girl’s uncle, the reason this particular family was targeted is because “they are a Christian family—persecuted.”

In short, as I wrote nearly a year ago, it continues to be “open season on Christians in Libya.” In February, 2014, after Ansar al-Sharia offered a reward to any Benghazi resident who helped round up and execute the nation’s Coptic Christian residents, seven Christians were forcibly seized from their homes by “unknown gunmen,” marched out into the desert and shot execution style some 20 miles west of Benghazi (graphic pictures appear here).

Days later, another Coptic Christian, Salama Fawzi, 24, was shot in the head while unloading food in front of his grocery stand in Benghazi, again, by several “unknown gunmen.” And the day after that, a corpse was found, believed to be that of another Copt—due to the small cross tattooed on his wrist traditionally worn by Egyptian Christians.

This is to say nothing of the churches attacked, of Christian cemeteries desecrated, and of 100 Christians—including Western ones—arrested, tortured (some dying) for possessing Christian “paraphernalia” (like Bibles and crosses) in the post “Arab Spring” Libya the Obama administration and its allies helped create.

Needless to say, such atrocities were unheard of under Gaddafi's "authoritarian" rule (just as they were unheard of in Saddam Hussein's Iraq).

As previously mentioned, Muslim persecution of Christians is the litmus test of how “radical” an Islamic society has become. Thus, in all those Mideast nations that the U.S. and its Western allies have interfered—Iraq, Egypt (under Morsi), Libya, and ongoing Syria—the increase of Christian persecution there is a reflection of the empowerment of forces hostile to everything Western civilization once stood for.

Ich wende mich hier an die religiöse Geistlichkeit. Wir müssen uns ernsthafte Gedanken über das was mit uns passiert; dieses Thema habe ich schon mehrere Male angesprochen.

Es ist unbegreiflich, dass durch unser heiligstes Gedankengut, die gesamte Islamische Welt (umma) der Grund für Furcht, Gefahr, Mord und Zerstörung der restlichen Welt ist. Unmöglich!

Diese Denkweise bringt die ganze Welt gegen uns auf – Ich spreche nicht von „Religion“ sondern von „Denkweisen“, einem Körper on Texten und Vorstellungen, die wir über die Jahre als heilig empfinden, bis zu dem Punkt, dass die Trennung von diesen Texten fast unmöglich ist. Sie bringt die ganze Welt gegen uns auf!

Ist es möglich, dass 1.6 Billionen Menschen (Muslims) die restlichen Bewohner dieser Erde , das sind 7 Billionen, töten wollen – so dass sie selbst leben können? Unmäglich!

Ich spreche diese Worte hier in der Al Azhar (al-Azhar-Universität, Kairo) vor versammelten Gelehrten und Religionsgelehrten. Möge der Allmächtige am letzten Tag Zeuge Eurer Wahrhaftigkeit sein, betreffend dem wovon ich jetzt spreche.

Alles wovon ich rede, könnt ihr nicht fühlen, solange ihr in dieser Denkweise gefangen bleibt.

Ihr müsst aus Euch heraustreten um die Fähigkeit zu erlangen, von einer mehr aufgeklärten und vorurteilsfreien Perspektive zu beobachten und zu reflektieren.

I sage es und wiederhole mich, dass wir eine religiöse Revolution benötigen.

Ihr Imams müsst euch vor Allah verantworten.

Die ganze Welt, ich wiederhole mich, die ganze Welt wartet auf euren nächsten Schritt, weil dieses Umma (Islamische Welt) zerrissen wird, es wird zerstört, es geht verloren – und es geht durch unsere eigenen Hände verloren.

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Bruce Thornton writes another great article today titled "Western Sleepwalkers and the Paris Massacre." He points out the utter lack of common sense in Western responses to repeated jihadi attacks, which are repeatedly portrayed as aberrations by Western media and leaders. Towards the end he writes, "Our ancestors for centuries acknowledged the true nature of Islam, a simple fact proven by 1000 years of Muslim aggression." He then quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, "one of our most brilliant political philosophers," who wrote the following in 1838:

Jihad, Holy war, is an obligation for all believers. … The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels … [T]hese doctrines of which the practical outcome is obvious are found on every page and in almost every word of the Koran … The violent tendencies of the Koran are so striking that I cannot understand how any man with good sense could miss them (emphasis added).

Even Egypt's Muslim president recently said that the Islamic "corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries" are terrorizing the entire world.

The fact is, centuries before the current excuses used to rationalize away Islamic violence ever even existed — colonialism, Israel, cartoons, "Orientalism" — Islam was behaving violently toward the "infidel." Concludes Thornton:

Our leaders today have slipped into delusional dreams, in which people like Tocqueville or Winston Churchill––who in 1897 said, “Civilization is face to face with militant Mohammedanism”––are dismissed as ignorant bigots and racists who lack our superior knowledge and morality. Meanwhile, the bodies of jihadism’s victims continue to pile up, and Iran’s genocidal theocracy closes in on a nuclear weapon. And many in the West continue to sleepwalk through it all.

FrontPage Magazine

By Bruce Thornton

The jihadist murderers are dead, after killing five more Parisians, but many Westerners, long drugged by bad ideas and received wisdom, continue to sleepwalk through the war against jihadism. This means that after all the brave words and feel-good marches, little significant action will be taken to prevent such atrocities from happening again.

In the absence of clear thinking and recognition of fact, responses to this latest example of Muslim violence reflect ideological fever dreams. “Nothing to do with the Muslim religion,” as French president François Holland said of the attacks, is a perennial favorite. Such apologists invoke shopworn Marxist bromides like colonialism, or postmodern magical thinking like “Orientalism,” the two-bit Foucauldian invention of Egyptian-American literary critic and fabulist Edward Said. This was the tack taken by an American historian of Egypt who told a New York Times reporter that Islam was “’just a veneer’” for [jihadist] anger at the dysfunctional Arab states left behind by colonial powers and the ‘Orientalist’ condescension many Arabs still feel from the West.”

For many apologists, though, it’s just easier to call the jihadists “crazy.” Here’s Vox’s Ezra Klein, long-time purveyor of progressive orthodoxy, opining on the Paris murders. He fingers “the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong.”

This repeats Jimmy Carter’s mistake about the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom he called a “crazy man.” But jihadists are not insane, and their violence cannot be dismissed so simply. They are proud Muslims, adherents of a 14-centuries-old faith that conquered its way to one of history’s largest empires, the warriors before whom a now dominant, arrogant West once trembled. Their faith preaches that Allah wills the whole world to be united under the rule of Islam and its illiberal, totalitarian law code. Those who resist and refuse to convert are defying Allah; they are the enemies of Islam, the denizens of the “House of War” who endanger the spiritual wellbeing of the faithful in the “House of Islam.” As such, the infidels are the legitimate objects of Muslim violence, conquest, enslavement, and dominance, an aggression recorded on every page of history. If you want contemporary evidence for the reality of jihad, look around the world today, where Muslim violence is endemic, and accompanied by theological arguments drawn straight from Islamic scripture, theology, and jurisprudence.

So contra Klein, the Paris jihadists didn’t do something “that almost no human beings anywhere ever do.” As we speak, plenty of Muslim human beings every day in Nigeria, Libya, Syria, northern Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, to name a few venues of jihadist violence, are doing “horrible” things like murder, torture, beheadings, rape, sex-slavery, crucifixion, and all the other atrocities that are also copiously documented in the history of Islamic conquest and occupation. As a brave Egyptian critic of Islam, Ahmed Harqan, asked recently, “What has ISIS done that Muhammad did not do?” Thus it’s no coincidence that of the 7 global conflicts costing at least 1000 lives a year, 6 involve Muslims.

Yet progressive orthodoxy dismisses this evidence as Islamophobic bigotry. Unable to deny the reality of theologically inspired Muslim violence daily filling the international news, they resort to blaming Western historical crimes, or scapegoating Israel. Another tack is to invoke the tu quoque fallacy, charging that Hebraism and Christianity are just as violent as Islam.

This argument took off after 9/11 and has persisted among the jihad deniers. Historian of religion Philip Jenkins claimed, “The Islamic scriptures [about war] in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible.” Rabid anti-Zionist and apologist for terrorists Richard Falk played the moral equivalence card: “The Great Terror War has so far been conducted as a collision of absolutes, a meeting ground of opposed fundamentalists.” Atheist gadfly Richard Dawkins complained about “fundamentalist” Christians who “fuel their tanks at the same holy gas station” as Muslim terrorists. Similarly, a few years ago, Salon ran a headline asking, “What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick.” This specious moral equivalence descended into the absurd after the attacks in Paris, when a guest on MSNBC equated “Islamic extremism,” which murders thousands a week, with preacher Jerry Falwell’s 1988 unsuccessful libel suit against Hustler magazine.

But even right-thinking people slip into this species of apologetics. A writer at Pajamas Media, in an otherwise perceptive analysis, wrote this as well: “Unfortunately, this civilizational friction between the west and Islam has ebbed and flowed across the centuries. It is nothing new. Islam threatened the gates of Vienna and the Crusades reached the Holy Land.” This smacks of the “cycle of violence” trope usually used against Israel. What it ignores is the fact that someone started the violence by serially invading and conquering the lands of others, and enslaving and oppressing their people. The siege of Vienna in 1683 was the last in a long history of Islamic military aggression against Europe and the centuries-long occupation of Western lands; the Crusades were an attempt to liberate from oppressive occupiers a land that had been Christian for centuries before being invaded by the armies of Islam.

Most important, however, is the simple fact that the violence in the Old Testament is, as Raymond Ibrahim points out, descriptive, not prescriptive. It reflects the brutal reality of its times, not a theology binding the faithful for all times. As for the New Testament, the only violent verses apologists can dredge up, as a New York Times article did last week, come from the apocalyptic predictions of Revelations, or these words of Christ from Matthew: “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.” Grade-school catechumens know that this is a metaphor, not a call to jihad, like the Koranic verses instructing Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them,” or to “fight those who do not believe in Allah,” or to “kill them wherever you find them.”

The whitewashing of Islam’s violent prescriptions serves another fantasy, the idea that there are vast majorities of “moderate” Muslims whose “religion of peace and tolerance” has been “highjacked” by a tiny number of “extremists.” Yet most who make this case just assert it, rather than providing empirical evidence. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, for example, quoted one of the Danish cartoonists who had to go into hiding after being attacked at his home for drawing one of the infamous Mohammed cartoons. He is hoping for “a reaction from the moderate majority of Muslims against this attack [in Paris].” Noonan then responds, “That majority actually exists, and should step forward.” This call to moderate Muslims was also made in theWall Street Journal by French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy: “Those whose faith is Islam must proclaim very loudly, very often and in great numbers their rejection of this corrupt and abject form of theocratic passion.”

But we’ve been waiting ever since 9/11 for moderate Muslims to “step forward” and “proclaim very loudly” that the jihadists have distorted their faith. A few apologists, brave critics, and duplicitous spin-doctors have spoken out, but the Muslim masses globally have been mostly silent. Of course, many Muslims have no desire to follow Islam’s precepts about waging jihad, and just want to live their lives in peace. But there have not been mass marches protesting those who murder in their name and who allegedly “corrupt,” as Eric Holder said in Paris, Islamic theology. Perhaps last Sunday’s rally of over a million Parisians will turn out to be an exception, assuming it included significant numbers of Muslims. But will there be any follow-through after the emotional high passes? Or will this moment of multicultural brotherhood dissipate, as it did following France’s 1998 World’s Cup soccer victory, when a million Parisians gathered in celebration?

This silence of the Muslim masses about jihadist terror has been the case for over a decade of such attacks. In 2004 after the brutal murder of Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam––another attack on free speech––only a handful of Dutch Muslims attended a public rally and memorial service. In the intervening years, after similar attacks––like the murder of 7 French Jews and soldiers in 2012, or the 3 Jews massacred in Brussels in 2014––we have not seen the kind of public, unequivocal, unqualified, mass condemnations of the jihadists one would expect if the latter were a fringe whose beliefs are so alien to traditional Islam.

What we have seen are thousands of Muslims celebrating in the streets after 9/11. We have seen riots and murders in response to Westerners exercising the right to free speech. We have seen rallies against Israel in which nakedly genocidal rhetoric is indulged––“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” is a favorite–– and temples attacked, as happened during Israel’s war against Hamas last summer. And we have seen polls consistently demonstrate that significant numbers of Muslims, including large majorities in the Middle East, continue to support an illiberal, intolerant shari’a law that codifies the attitudes and beliefs justifying such violence.

Our ancestors for centuries acknowledged the true nature of Islam, a simple fact proven by 1000 years of Muslim aggression. Alexis de Tocqueville, one of our most brilliant political philosophers, wrote in 1838, “Jihad, Holy war, is an obligation for all believers. … The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels … [T]hese doctrines of which the practical outcome is obvious are found on every page and in almost every word of the Koran … The violent tendencies of the Koran are so striking that I cannot understand how any man with good sense could miss them.”

But that was when our leaders and intellectuals, schooled by history and experience, their minds not blinded by fashionable self-loathing and incoherent cultural relativism, were “men of good sense.” Our leaders today have slipped into delusional dreams, in which people like Tocqueville or Winston Churchill––who in 1897 said, “Civilization is face to face with militant Mohammedanism”––are dismissed as ignorant bigots and racists who lack our superior knowledge and morality. Meanwhile, the bodies of jihadism’s victims continue to pile up, and Iran’s genocidal theocracy closes in on a nuclear weapon. And many in the West continue to sleepwalk through it all.