The Potential for Terrorism

'"The FBI conducted internal database reviews, interagency checks and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism," the bureau said.' This from a recent article on Chelsea bomber Rahami.

What people still don't seem to understand is that you don't need "ties to terrorism" in order to be a Jihadist. There are virtually tens of millions of would-be Jihadists. They already believe in the doctrine of Jihad and martyrdom; of conquering the world for Islam or to die trying.

All that's lacking in these potential Jihadists is the will to act. Some will act sooner than others, some might never act at all. But they are all believers in the supremacy of Islam, and that the end-times cannot be ushered in until Islam has dominion over all the peoples of every nation on Earth.

Ideas are dangerous - more so than bullets and bombs. We have to fight the ideas that make becoming a Jihadist so easy. But you cannot challenge an idea if you don't even recognize its existence. Jihad and martyrdom are attractive ideas to a sizable proportion of the world's population, and this cannot be allowed to continue.

Political, Militant Islam, which is to say Islam, is just an idea. It's an idea born in the deserts of 7th century Arabia. Is it any wonder these ideas are so barbaric? Islam, as an idea, is no different than National Socialism or Stalinism as an idea. And when we went to war, we didn't just go to war against Nazis and Stalinists, we waged a war of ideas.

We win ideological battles even when we're not trying, as evidenced by the many heroes of secularism living under oppressive regimes, many of which are Islamic. Imagine what we could accomplish if we really tried to destroy the ideas found within Islam and, ultimately, all religion.

I focus on Islam, the way many public intellectuals have been and should be doing in recent years, because we are at war with Islamic ideology in a way that we are not (and never will be) at war with Hinduism or Buddhism or Judaism or even most modern incarnations of Christianity.

Islam is the ideology that can take a supposed "moderate" and turn him or her into a walking time-bomb at any second. All a person has to do is read their favorite verse about killing the infidel one more time before they're convinced enough to act. Islam does this to people, not Christianity. not Buddhism, but Islam.

It's high time we recognize the difference among religions and treat dangerous, toxic, deadly ideas as dangerous, toxic, and deadly, instead of engaging in endless obscurantism and apologetics.

Religions are simply ideas. And some ideas are worse than others. If you fail to recognize this, then something is wrong with your capacity to reason. For you surely recognize bad ideas in other realms of discourse. You probably agree that Nazism is a bad idea; that most forms of ultra-nationalism are bad ideas; and you probably use these examples to support your worldview or your petty identity politics.

Yet on the subject of religion, and ONE religion in particular, you lose sight of all objectivity and reason when it comes to identifying and denouncing bad ideas.

This will not end well. Not for you, not for anyone.

Suspending the Schengen agreement and what it means for Europe

And so it begins. The famous Schengen agreement has been suspended by Germany, the country that wanted more immigrants and wanted other countries to "share the burden."

For those of you who don't know, the Schengen agreement is one between EU members to allow for freedom of movement between countries. In other words, once you make it to a Schengen nation, you can travel freely to all other signatory states; no papers, no passports, not so much as a library card.

Germany, the de facto "leader" of the EU is the first to break the treaty, and did so as a direct response to the recent massive influx of migrants. I won't call them refugees because most of them came from Turkey or Jordan or Lebanon where they were out of harm's way.

These migrants are demanding, en masse, to be allowed into the wealthiest EU nations and they are not hiding their reasons; free money and housing from the state. Many are refusing (yes, REFUSING) to go to Denmark because Denmark recently cut their payouts in half, and are demanding to go to Sweden instead, because Sweden gives a little more money to "refugees" and asylum seekers.

I ask you, what sort of refugee is it who smiles through his teeth at you while making unreasonable demands, chanting Allahu Akbar, and who has been in no real danger for a year or more? They are not fleeing Syria for Europe, they are fleeing Turkey (where there are no welfare benefits) for the EU because it's El Dorado.

There already exist countless ghettos across Europe made up almost entirely of Muslims who live in self-imposed isolation who receive income and housing from their host nation, and who demand more while giving nothing in return. These are not meek and mild victims of war, these are wolves in sheep's clothing who know just how to manipulate the western mindset in order to get what they want.

As more and more of these migrants flood Europe with their unreasonable demands and suck the social welfare systems dry (which were working perfectly well before the number of Muslims skyrocketed, though I'm sure that's just a coincidence) I'm sure we'll see more and more Schengen members putting their border controls back into place which, if you ask me, is long overdue.

The EU superstate was doomed to fail eventually, it was just sped up by bureaucrats and politicians who kept insisting that the problem with Europe was not enough multiculturalism, not enough immigrants, and not enough Islam.

Einstein once said, "the definition of idiocy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." And that, friends, is precisely what Europe has done. Only this failed experiment did not take place in a university laboratory with only frustrated scientists and grad students affected by it - this failed experiment has doomed countless millions of free citizens to a future of violence, death, and despair.

The never-ending Hijrah

Every single day the actions of Muslims (using only Islamic sources and justification) on every continent prove that the status-quo of western appeasement policies have utterly failed. The left has failed us on everything from immigration to women's rights - all in the name of religious tolerance and the myth of an unattainable 'multicultural' global society.

What is the point of fighting for women's rights and the LGBT community if you are simply going to allow one group of gay-hating misogynists to do whatever they please because you don't want to be labeled 'racist' by your clueless peers? Have the balls to call it like it is - far too many Muslim men treat women like shit and would love to kill homosexuals; and I'm only referring to those Muslim men living in the West.

Why have we allowed this to happen? Millions of our neighbors hate us, don't share our values, and want to replace democratic systems and secularism with theocracy and Sharia. Poll after poll tells us this is undoubtedly true, and no amount of nay-saying or trying to sweep it under the rug will make it go away. This is the reality of the moment. And what do we do? We invite more of the same people into our cities by the tens of thousands under the guise of humanitarianism.

We know this is not humanitarianism because of how they behave once they get to Europe or elsewhere - they are ungrateful, they purposefully isolate themselves, they champion jihadist causes over secular ones, and they cause violence where once there was none. This is the pattern in every major city that accepts large numbers of Muslim immigrants and asylum-seekers.

But no, we are told that the problem MUST somehow lie with us. WE aren't doing enough to help, WE are racist, WE are Islamophobic, and on and on. When these western cities invite immigrants from other parts of the world who are not Muslims they never seem to have a problem - they integrate seamlessly and are truly thankful to be able to live and work in a free country. It is obvious, then, that the 'racism' felt by Muslims is yet another myth.

It's time that we open our eyes and realize that the pattern of violence and hatred that pops up in city after city is due almost exclusively to the introduction of Muslim immigrants who don't and who never will share our values. Or are we all just going to sit back and watch while everything we know and love gets taken from us because we were too afraid or too stupid or too politically correct to act?

The oldest Quran? So what?

I can't stand the people calling for a stop to religious debates. Why? They found an old Koran - great. Now we can see just how far back the hateful doctrine of Islam goes. You don't have to be a right-wing bigot to spot an intolerant ideology. Many of us who speak out against Islam are liberal in every sense of the word - and we despise Islam and the Koran because it is the antithesis of our modern values.

This is usually the point where people point to the other monotheistic faiths and the barbarism of the Bible. Today, it is almost exclusively Muslims (who believe their book to be, word for word, the literal truth of God) who follow the inhuman commandments of their holy book. So the argument falls flat on its face.

Find me a large group of Christians and Jews who force millions of women to cover their faces from the world (no, it's not a choice no matter how many times you say it); who still accept and condone slavery; who view holy war and suicide missions as the highest form of devotion; who throw gays from tall buildings; who kill their own daughters for the "crime" of having sex or being raped...

There are many Islamic States other than ISIS - and they are all horrible places to live unless you are a man and the 'right' kind of Muslim - Saudi, Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Libya...

There are also plenty of 'Christian' nations and only one Jewish one. In every instance, the Christian states, and Israel, are far superior to any state which follows even a lax form of Sharia. Again, this is because Muslims still believe every word of their book and still follow the teachings of Mohammed, a maniacal, genocidal Arab warlord.

All of the trouble we see coming from the Islamic world and Muslim communities in the west are easily understandable and make perfect sense when you come to the realization that believing and following Islam and Mohammed are the problem - the teachings are rotten to the core and are completely incompatible with secularism, democracy, and human rights.

It is only when we start making excuses for the behavior of Muslims and blaming all of their problems on external factors that we begin to confuse the issue - which only makes matters worse. Muslims are not victims, nor are they a minority, and they are almost always the cause of their own problems because the theological doctrine of Sharia that millions upon millions of Muslims want to see implemented worldwide is a travesty.

There was no Golden Age of Islam - there were Muslim conquerors and dhimmi subjects; there were slaves and concubines; there was mass genocide from India to southern Europe. For nearly nine centuries Islam brutally subjugated everyone in its path, destroyed languages and cultures, and takes credit for merely assimilating the great works of others.

The Islamic empires collapsed not because of politics or economics, but because of Islam itself. Islam lends itself to supremacist thinking, lethargy, and intolerance; there is no room for progressive ideas from within Islam - everything must come from without. And when the more Islamic segments of a society hold any influence whatsoever, it leads to disaster.

The only thing that has kept Islam from rearing its ugly head was western colonialism followed by the military juntas put up in its place. Once the dictators started falling we began to see exactly what Islam is; and it is no different from Moghul Islam (which massacred Hindus by the millions) or the fabled Islam of Andalusia (which slaughtered thousands of Jews in a single afternoon because two of their number had risen above Dhimmi status).

Despite the assumptions you will make due to my name, I was raised a Muslim by Muslim parents in a Muslim country for the first 17 years of my life. I believed in the truth of Islam, largely because I was ignorant of what it actually was. Most Muslims have no idea what Islam teaches, but they will defend it viciously because they are taught to do so, and because it is an extension of their identity.

Many Muslims who realize the truth about Islam will embrace it fully and become Jihadists or sympathizers. However, there are enough who will reject it outright upon discovering what Islam says about the treatment of women, the keeping of slaves, that Christians and Jews and polytheists are lower than scum, that adulterers should be stoned to death, and so many more atrocities.

This is not done 'in the name of Islam' it is MANDATED directly by Mohammed and by the Koran. Koranic verses which may seem more tolerant than others have been abrogated and superseded by the violent ones - any Islamic scholar will tell you as much. And again, I don't care what the bible says because Jews and Christians are not engaged in barbaric behavior to nearly the same insidious level as Muslims are because of some old words in some old book.

Jews and Christians have long ago learned to laugh at themselves and the ridiculous stories. The ones who hold onto the Bible as literal truth are scoffed at and ridiculed by everyone else. Not so in Islam. Try a little experiment - the next time you are at a gathering of friends who identify as Christian, try reading from Leviticus and watch the horrified reactions and looks of shock.
Now, try the same with a group of Muslims while reading about beheading and cutting off body parts from the Quran and they will nod in agreement and praise Allah for his wisdom.

Islam is a problem because Muslims believe in it, it really is that simple. So you can take this old Koran they just found along with all the others and do what you should do with any atrocious book - ignore it. Sure, keep it on the bookshelves because it's a part of human history and culture, but it is a very bad part of human history, and one that we should all be trying to finally put behind us.

On Irshad Manji and other things...

We definitely allow Muslims of all stripes to get away with demonizing anyone critical of Islam. We do this in the name of tolerance, multiculturalism, and political correctness. Western apologists defend Islam and are doing so out of ignorance or, like any Muslim engaged in Taqiyya, are lying to paint Islam in a positive light.

Since the reformation Islam needs is unlikely to come from within the Muslim community - Irshad and M. Nawaz are a tiny fraction of the world's Muslims - we must do what we can to halt the perpetuation of the 'Religion of Peace' lie as well as the false accusations of bigotry, racism, and Islamophobia.

I was born to Muslim parents and raised in a Muslim country. It is only thanks to non Muslim critics of Islam (Robert Spencer, Sam Harris) that I began to question. Like the vast majority of Muslims, I was largely ignorant of the actual doctrine and merely memorized verses and rituals.

There are two paths a Muslim can take upon beginning to understand the true nature of Islam. The first is to become horrified and slowly but surely abandon the ideology. The second is to embrace it and become a mujahid or at the very least a sympathizer to jihad and Islamic totalitarianism. Of my Muslim friends and family, most follow the latter path, while those who choose the former are forced to live a lie for fear of persecution and death. Open apostasy is a rare thing indeed.

Irshad and her ilk may have good intentions, but calling oneself a Muslim does not a Muslim make. Islam, as an ideology, exists independently of what anyone wishes it to be. Anyone who has actually studied the doctrine understands that it does not allow self criticism, and that its central message is that of supremacy, submission, hatred of non Muslims, and the spread of Islam by any means necessary.

As an ex Muslim, I have to say that waiting around for Irshad-like reformers to have any real impact is a waste of time and blood. Their message falls on deaf ears and rings hollow. Incessant criticism of Islam and continually pointing out the shameful and abhorrent behavior of Muslims is the only way I'm aware of to actually jolt Muslims and non-Muslims alike into accepting reality.

We can no longer permit this hyper offense-taking on the part of Muslims. We can no longer make the claim that Islam is compatible with democracy and human rights. We can no longer watch the Irshads of the world try to reconcile the medieval, totalitarian ideology that is Islam with modernity. Irshad is not a Muslim, she does not speak for Islam, and she'd be much better off going the way of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and publicly declaring herself not a Muslim and explaining why this is so.

On the comparison of Islam to other religions

First, it is almost impossible to find an equivalent to the doctrines of Jihad, Hijrah, and Taqiyaa in any other religion;

Second, comparing Islam to polytheistic movements founded on peace and non-violence is preposterous;

Third, Islam is often compared to Christianity and it is this comparison which will be the focal point of this piece.

Let us start at the beginning; and as Christianity is the older of the two let us start with Christianity and its central figure - Jesus. Jesus, for the most part, preached non-violence, tolerance and respect for others, and love.

Early Christians followed the example of Jesus and attempted to spread this message of pacifism and love and were met with hostility from all sides. For 300 years, Christianity was a fledgling religion whose adherents were regularly mocked and persecuted.

It is not until the adoption of Christianity as the official state religion of the mighty, far-reaching Roman Empire that Christianity began to take on a political dimension. It is not until the Council of Nicaea that men assembled and codified what would become dogma for the next thousand years.

Beginning at Nicaea, we see Christianity saddled with the Old Testament, we see the imposition of male-dominated, warlike Roman culture onto a peace-loving faith, we see the codification into cannon law of misogyny, blasphemy laws, the establishment of a hierarchical priesthood, etc.

Indeed, Christianity became an extension of Roman imperialism and eventually a means to dictate law and consolidate power and authority after the empire's decline. Who has more authority than God, after all?

Let us now consider Islam. Islam, from its very beginnings, was (and remains to this day) an ideology of total domination. Muhammad was a violent man and a conquering warlord. The first year of the Islamic calendar is the Hijrah, and this is also very telling.

Hijrah, or jihad by emigration, is, according to Islamic tradition, the migration or journey of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib, later renamed by him to Medina, in the year 622 CE. It was after the hijrah that Muhammad for the first time became not just a preacher of religious ideas, but a political and military leader.

That was what occasioned his new “revelations” exhorting his followers to commit violence against unbelievers. Significantly, the Islamic calendar counts the hijrah, not Muhammad’s birth or the occasion of his first “revelation,” as the beginning of Islam, implying that Islam is not fully itself without a political and military component.

During Muhammad's lifetime and in the decades after his death, Islam conquered vast swaths of territory across the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa and Persia, and by the year 750 had conquered nearly all of Spain. In the span of 100 years, Islam went from nothing to a vast empire to be reckoned with - and woe to the conquered.

This type of expansion does not happen by accident, and is not done by meek and mild missionaries proselytizing from village to village. The doctrine of Islam is clear; make them convert to Islam, enslave those who don't, kill those who resist, and make dhimmis of the remaining Christians and Jews.

Islam was spread by the sword, and killed and enslaved millions upon millions of everyone in its path, most notably black Africans and Hindus. In one hundred years, Islam had committed atrocities heretofore unheard of in Christian Europe.

This stark contrast between the early years of these two religions (though I still hold that Islam is first a fascist, totalitarian political ideology) should tell you everything you need to know.

It is not uncommon for us to hear from our 'moderate' Muslim friends and apologists for Islam that, "Islam has been hijacked by Arab Tribalism" or some other such nonsense. Nothing could be further from the truth - Islam is the perfect reflection of the mind of its founder: a tribal, Arab warlord and a most violent figure by any standard and within any historical context.

Christianity on the other hand was, in fact, hijacked by powerful men in a pre-existing empire for their own gain - the small folk can be kept in check by invoking the almighty and actual power in the form of military might is no longer necessary. Islam was founded as a doctrine of supremacy and violence by a paranoid egomaniac who would (and did) stop at nothing to elevate himself above all and to see others cower in fear before him.

"Blessed are the meek" ~ Jesus

"I have been made victorious through terror" ~ Muhammad.

Defeating IS begins with individual Muslims.

The only wars worth fighting are ideological. Every western, civilized nation which purports to represent and defend freedom, whose secular laws are based on human rights and principles of the enlightenment, and who wish for their way of life to continue and flourish should be engaged in an all-out war against Islamic State and its sympathizers.

IS is the ultimate culmination of Islamic doctrine - which is to say the complete negation of everything the west has fought for and accomplished over the last five centuries: science, art, music, freedom (of expression, thought, religion), democracy, separation of church and state and, perhaps most importantly, the emancipation of women and ending slavery.

This all-out war must be a war of ideas every bit as much as a war on the battlefield. Far too many Muslims have a worldview which is completely opposed to everything we know and understand about morality and basic human decency. And while these same Muslims may not be actively joining IS and taking up arms, they are guilty of sharing the same ideas on slavery, stoning, beheading, the treatment of women and infidels, and a host of others.

That these Muslims live in societies which supposedly value freedom above all else is the only thing keeping them from making their neighborhoods look exactly like IS-controlled territories - and western cities are on the losing end of this battle. Go to the Muslim-majority areas of Malmo, Birmingham, Marseille or Rotterdam and you will quickly realize just how unfree these areas are; where the clerics with their loudspeakers rule with absolute authority; where gangs of young men rape and assault women who are not covered; and where even the police fear to enter.

This has nothing to do with racism, and it has nothing to do with a lack of integration efforts on the part of white Europeans. These Muslims loathe westerners and everything they stand for because their religion tells them to do so - they don't want to integrate, they don't want to live in a peaceful society, and they don't share the same values. No other immigrant group causes anywhere near the same degree of friction as with Muslim immigrants. If racism were a factor, then surely Asian and Indian (non-Muslim) immigrants would be feeling the supposed "backlash" that Muslims do - never mind that Islam is not a race.

If Muslims in Europe feel that they are discriminated against it is because of their behavior and their hatred of everything un-Islamic - all of which comes from the Quran and Mohammed. If there are Muslims who don't agree with Quran and Mohammed, who want to integrate, and who want to leave the barbaric ideology behind them, then they have to speak up against the clerics and the loudspeakers in favor of freedom and human rights for all.

Muslims who don't follow Islam think they can have it both ways; they think they can call themselves Muslims and defend Islam while also championing secular values such as free speech and freedom of religion. I'm sorry, you can't have it both ways since they are incompatible ideas. Islam is a totalitarian ideology that actively condones slavery, subjugating women, killing non-Muslims, killing homosexuals, killing atheists and agnostics, and spreading these ideas by any means necessary.

Unlike other monotheistic faiths, Islam has not been reformed largely because its doctrine is the most rigid to begin with - there is no room for interpretation in the Quran and the Hadith. Unless and until Muslims the world over stand up and say, "I reject the barbaric passages of the Quran and most of the Hadith" then I'm afraid this ideological struggle - which reemerged only after western influence in Muslim lands disappeared - has only just begun.

The central figure in Islam is Mohammed - and even a cursory reading of his life and biography show a wholly contemptible individual not worthy of the slightest praise. Mohammed's mantra was dominate others at all costs, rape and pillage, win victory through terror. By contrast, the central figures of Christianity and Buddhism are found to speak of love and kindness and forgiveness - ideas completely foreign to Islamic theology.

Is it any wonder, then, why believing Muslims behave a certain way when compared to the adherents of other faiths? Christians can easily reject the violence and immorality of the Old Testament by pointing to the example of Jesus. Judaism is not a proselytizing faith hell-bent on world domination - and most Rabbis and lay Jews are more than happy to busy themselves with the minutiae of the Hebrew language and Judaic jurisprudence. Not to mention that most practicing Jews fall under the 'Reformed' category.

It is only with Muslims that we find such a strict adherence to the sacred text and the example of its founder. One must reject the morality of Islam in order to embrace true morality and human empathy