Robert Spencer has a piece at FrontPageMag.com that no one who wishes to understand Islamism should forego. The article discusses a Muslim rally in Dearborn, Michigan last Friday that was essentially an anti-American, anti-Israeli demonstration and focuses on the teaching of one hero of the Faith, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Here are some excerpts:
As Khomeini himself put it: "Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world....But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world."
The goal of this conquest would be to establish the hegemony of Islamic law. As Khomeini put it: "What is the good of us [i.e., the mullahs] asking for the hand of a thief to be severed or an adulteress to be stoned to death when all we can do is recommend such punishments, having no power to implement them?"
Khomeini accordingly delivered [this]notorious rebuke to the Islam-is-a-religion-of-peace crowd: "Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter [their armies].... Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Qur'anic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim."
Was the woman who carried Khomeini's image in the Dearborn demonstration concerned about the human rights of women? Did she know that the Ayatollah himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight? Did she know that Khomeini called marriage to a girl before her first menstrual period "a divine blessing," and advised the faithful: "Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house"?
That should give us an idea of what sort of men are lionized by the Muslim community in our midst. If putative Christians were to march through a large city carrying placards with Adolf Hitler's visage the MSM would be apoplectic, and rightly so. So where is the outrage over Dearborn? Why do Muslims get a pass from the MSM when they all but worship bloodthirsty perverts?
Included in Spencer's essay is this very revealing paragraph:
It is unlikely that the protestor knew that in 1985, Sa'id Raja'i-Khorassani, the Permanent Delegate to the United Nations from the Islamic Republic of Iran, declared, according to Amir Taheri, that "the very concept of human rights was 'a Judeo-Christian invention' and inadmissible in Islam. . . . According to Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the Shah's 'most despicable sins' was the fact that Iran was one of the original group of nations that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."
Human rights derive from a Judeo-Christian world-view, and Islam repudiates the very concept. There is a profound admission here that needs to be more fully explored. It needs to be addressed by those in Europe who may be voting to admit Turkey into the EU, and it needs to be given serious consideration as we move further down the road toward democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. If this view of human rights really is the Muslim view, will Muslims ever be able to live in, and among, truly democratic governments? Will they be willing to abjure some of their Islamic convictions in order to hoist themselves into the twenty first century?
It seems to us that the West has four choices if it wishes to survive the Islamic threat: We can try to persuade them to modify their view of human rights (and much else) as we teach them the ways of democracy and freedom; we can quarantine them by placing a military-political-economic cordon around the Middle-East and keeping Muslims out of our own countries; or we can engage them in endless war for the next three or four generations until one side or the other lies exhausted on the field; or we can simply annihilate them with nuclear weapons.
The last is unthinkable, the third is unacceptable, the second is impractical, and the first is what President Bush is trying to achieve. He deserves our prayers, especially because the future peace of the world, and perhaps its very survival, depends upon his success.