And they are worried with good reason. The Pope certainly isn't leading a new Crusade, but Rome is nevertheless the apple of the jihadist eye. One of the most influential Muslim clerics in the world, Sheikh al-Qaradawi, said this a few years ago:
The friends of the Prophet heard that two cities would be conquered by Islam, Romiyya and Constantinople, and the Prophet said that 'Hirqil [i.e. Constantinople] would be conquered first.' Romiyya is Rome, the capital of Italy, and Constantinople was the capital of the state of Byzantine Rome, which today is Istanbul. He said that Hirqil which is Constantinople, would be conquered first and this is what happened…All right, Constantinople was conquered, and the second part of the prophecy remains, that is, the conquest of Romiyya. This means that Islam will return to Europe. Islam entered Europe twice and left it… Perhaps the next conquest, Allah willing, will be by means of preaching and ideology. The conquest need not necessarily be by the sword… [The conquest of Mecca] was not by the sword or by war, but by a [Hudabiyya] treaty, and by peace… Perhaps we will conquer these lands without armies.
Note what he says about the Treaty of Hudaibiyya, which Islamic apologists routinely present in the West as something perfectly on the up-and-up, but note that he says twice that the Islamic conquest of Rome would only perhaps come without violence. He leaves the door to violent jihad in Rome spectactularly ajar.
"Vatican Security Worries Over bin Laden Tape," by Ian Fisher for the New York Times (thanks to all who sent this in):
ROME — The Vatican on Thursday rejected an audiotaped accusation from Osama bin Laden that Pope Benedict XVI was leading a “new Crusade” against Muslims, but Italian security officials were concerned about the threats included in Mr. bin Laden’s new message.“These accusations are absolutely unfounded,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the pope’s chief spokesman, said in a telephone interview. “There is nothing new in this, and it doesn’t have any particular significance for us.”
The audio message attributed to Mr. bin Laden was released Wednesday night and was addressed to “the intelligent ones in the European Union.” It was posted on a militant Web site on Wednesday, and an English transcription was distributed Thursday by the SITE Intelligence Group in Bethesda, Md., which tracks postings by Al Qaeda on the Internet.
The audiotape listed broad grievances, but specifically mentioned the pope, and coincided with the busiest week of the year at the Vatican, the week leading up to Easter Sunday. The pope, who turns 81 next month, will appear at several public events, including the annual Good Friday procession of the Stations of the Cross at the Colosseum.
In the five-minute message, the speaker said there would be a “severe” reaction against the publication in Europe of cartoons many Muslims considered offensive to the Prophet Muhammad. He said the cartoons — one reprinted last month in Denmark, more than two years after they were first published there — “came in the framework of a new Crusade in which the pope of the Vatican has played a large, lengthy role.”
Without naming any specific action or target, the speaker said, “The response will be what you see and not what you hear, and let our mothers bereave us if we do not make victorious our messenger of God.”
Father Lombardi dismissed the accusations, noting that the pope had condemned the cartoons several times and stressed that “religion must be respected.”...
That's a pity. Because religion should be respected, but what should be the penalty for not respecting it? And what happens when Muslims begin to assert that respect for Islam requires Christians to make impossible concessions?
>>Because religion should be respected, but what should be the penalty for not respecting it? --RS
Doesn't a religion, by its tenets and principles and beliefs, have to prove that it's *worthy* of respect, first?
[The conquest of Mecca] was not by the sword or by war, but by a [Hudabiyya] treaty, and by peace
Conquest and peace don't go together. Conquest is required only in the face of opposition or resistance. The quote should read:
but by a [Hudabiyya] treaty, and by SURRENDER
The Meccans surrendered. And anyway, didn't Mohammed break his own treaties?
Suggested possible statistics recognize all Christian religions at around 33Pct. of the worlds population, and Muslims at a little over 19 Pct. However there exists a statistic that says nearly 14Pct. are non-religious in some way or another. The differences between the Islamic religion, and the Christian religion is the stronger almost forced adherence by Muslims particularly in the Middle East such as the threat of being marked an apostate. The point being that, it is much more difficult to get a true count or percentage of those who profess their belief in Christian Doctrine, thus it is more likely that the non-religous group of nearly 14Pct. would aline themselves with Christianity.
Osama Bin Laden treads in dangerous waters when he dares imply any threats to the Pope and Christianity. You know how protective we are of the tiny Jewish Religion which represents two tenths of one percent of the worlds religions.
And her Osama is messing with a religous leader who is respected by most of Christian religions which may make up over 40 Pct of the worlds religous population.
It seems to me that this is a pretty sly message, the appeal to an unspecified "wise ones" could appeal to any whose ego is puffed up by feelings of wisdom. It reminds me of the athenian statesman who won elections by promising "fairness" everybody had their own peculiar ideas of what was fair so the statesman won the votes of all different classes of people who only wanted what was fair.
The biblical verse, "being wise in their own eyes, they became fools" seems to apply here.
Darcy asked, "Doesn't a religion, by its tenets and principles and beliefs, have to prove that it's *worthy* of respect, first?"
I think that tenets, principles, and beliefs are one way that people judge such things, but when tenets principles and beliefs do not seem to be applied in real life then no matter how high sounding or correct those stated goals are they only serve to hoist the group on their own petard.
Ideals are nice things to have, but if they were ever fully realizable they would be called realities not ideals, so the gap between rhetoric and practice also makes a difference on how I judge a religion.
Many have attempted to brand Islam as the religion of peace, but the gap between the rhetoric and the reality is so great that only the most imaginative liberals and forked tongue politicians seem to be able to state it without snorting.
Robert:
"Because religion should be respected, but what should be the penalty for not respecting it?"
I disagree with this on two grounds:
1. What determines a religion? If it includes a mandate to wage war against non-believers until the world is solely dar al harb, does dressing it up as the will of a deity mean it is a religion?
2. No religion should be respected just because it says it is a religion. It can be criticised, mocked and dismissed by those who don't accept silly beliefs as sacred. This happens to all religions without a problem. Only one objects - violently or with threats of violence.
I don't think an ideology that disrespects anybody who doesn't regard it at truth should demand respect from those same people.
I for one will never respect Islam or its paedophile prophet.
I think his Holiness is safe, unless he starts drawing cartoons.
"Islam entered Europe twice and left it… Perhaps the next conquest, Allah willing, will be by means of preaching and ideology. The conquest need not necessarily be by the sword… [The conquest of Mecca] was not by the sword or by war, but by a [Hudabiyya] treaty, and by peace… Perhaps we will conquer these lands without armies."
-- from the article above, quoting Yusef Al-Qaradawi, the most famous Sunni cleric (and popular explicator of Islam to the Muslim masses) in the world
Things to engrave on your memory, and assimilate into your understanding:
1) Muslims, history-haunted, see their entry into Europe as part of a series. The first two times, they were halted: at Poitiers, by Charles Martel, and at the Gates of Vienna (though they did swallow the Balkans and controlled much of southeastern and central Europe, all the way into Hungary). But Al-Qaradawi, for a Muslim audience, refers -- casually, not carefully, as if everyone understood that this was a desideratum, a goal of Islam -- to "the next conquest.
2) "the conquest need not be necessarily by the sword"
In other words, qitaal or combat, the traditional means by which Islam was spread, and what we call "terrorism" is for most Muslims merely a form of qitaal, or combat (because their definition of a "non-civilian" is much wider than in the non-Muslim world), is not, Qaradawi recognizes, the only or even the most effective menas to conquer the military more powerful Infidel lands.
For now, the West is militarily simply too powerful. But other means are available; such conquest can be, he foresees, "by means of preaching and ideology." That is, by campaigns of Da'wa, as supported by the new, growing, still-unopposed and certainly unhalted demographic conquest, that Muslims discuss openly among themselves, and sometimes even refer to it, sometimes slightly masked, the triumphalism slightly disguised, to the Infidel audiences that need to know, as Harvard's Muslim chaplain just put it, we are "going to be more and more visible" (and there is nothing That is the meaning of the Hudaibiyya Treaty for Muslimis: the
This is a lesson for those squandering resources in Iraq: pay attention, for god's sake, now, to what is happening in Western Europe, before your distracted eyes. Pay attention to the Money Weapon, to Da'wa, to demographic conquest. Pay attention to every surrender to every Muslim demand, no matter how seemingly minor or inoccuous, which is part of a sustained, never-to-be-ended assault, on our legal and political instiutions, our social arrangements, our understandings of our own history (yes, the history of Euroope is being rewritten to accommodate Muslim demands, and so as not to offend Muslim students who might, if offended, do all kinds of things; the history of the United States is not yet under that kind of assault, but when a State Department official parrots Muslim nonsense about "Muslims" who were in the crew of Christopher Columbus, or when others help to back-date a Muslim presence and pretend that Muslims helped to create this country. The truth is, of course, that Muslims had no part in the creation of this country, no influence whatsoever, and could not opssibly have had, for both the letter and the spirit of the Holy Law of Islam, the Shari'a, flatly contradict the American Constitution. There is nothing in the legal and political institutioins of this country, nothing in its science, nothing in its art, nothing in its sense of humor, nothing in its music, nothing in its social arrangements and understandings and easygoing tolerances, that have a thing to do with Islam. But that will not keep Muslims from trying to get us to mis-understand our own history, the same way that Tariq Ramadan keeps claiming that Islam was responsible for the Renaissance, Islam can be thanked for this and for that. It's all an assault on history and the truth, on our history, and what the West is all about. It must not only not be accepted, but mocked, held up for inspection, and its proponents simply booted out from whatever positions of influence they may have slyly managed to obtain, through the machinations of, for example, fellow members of that MESA Nostra Network (google "MESA Nostra") that help explain such things as how Omid Safi, having been foiled at Harvard Divinity School (where Leila Ammed, William Graham, and Diana Eck, tried to get him a post), ends up at Chapel Hill, thanks to Carl Ernst, about whom you can find out more by googling his name together with "Jihad Watch."
3) "The conquest of Mecca] was not by the sword or by war, but by a [Hudabiyya] treaty, and by peace… "
Exactly. Always good to have it said so plainly, straight from the horse's mouth. Here is Qaradawi, admiring -- as Muslims generally admire -- how Muhammad managed, following his own famous advice, "war is deception," to trick the Meccans by agreeing to certain conditions, and thereby buying time so that his forces could become stronger, and then, when eighteen months later they were stronger, concocting an excuse to breach the treaty and attack the Meccans -- through the "treaty" and through "peace."
There's an obvious lesson here, but for reasons that would require a convention of psychologists and psychiatrists to explain, the Israelis keep signing such ridicuous agreeements, keep being suckered, and still come back for more. And it is not only Israel. Any Infidels who think that they can come to an agreement, an understanding, with Muslims, and that the Muslim side, once the Infidels have performed their part of the bargain, will come through as promised, need to have their heads examined at that same imaginary conference.
But at least, the next time some Muslim, forced by your display of knowledge (and how alarming such displays can be, whenever a Muslim or Muslim apologist delivers a lecture on campus, or at some Interfaith Healing meeting, or at a Mosque Outreach Night -- how very disturbing, how most unpleasant, a knowledgeable Infidel can be, especially if other Infidels in the audience start to listen, start to take it in), will claim that it was the Meccans who breached the Treaty with Muhammad. But Muslims among themselves are most admiring of Muhammad's trickery, find it most admirable. And Qaradawi's statement above can be useful as demonstrating that almost universally-accepted view, by Muslims, of Muhammad's feat of deception in 628 A.D.
You might wish to print out the excerpt from Qaradawi that is put at the top of this posting. Print it out, and carry it around with you. Useful for those casual run-ins and discussions with people, the ones that you must start engaging in, whenever and wherever you can. With colleagues, with your children, with the lady standing in the same line at the checkout counter, or the man at the dry cleaners. Only thus will the silence of our ruling-class lambs be overcome, or the bleatings of our press, radio, and television, attempting always to think up new ways to misinform us about the meaning, and therefore the menace, of Islam, go unheard because an informed and therefore alarmed citizenry is awake, and like those Committees of Correspondence of yore, are talking each to each, about the real nature of Islam, and what will happen, to Italy and France and Great Britain and the Netherlands and the rest of Western Europe, and what will happen here, with a time lag, if we don't wake up, and keep thinking it is only a matter of "extremists" and of "terrorism" and of bringing toys and good things to eat to those boys and girls, the children of those "ordinary moms and dads" about whom Bush likes to prate, in Iraq or elsewhere in the Muslim domains.
The savage cult that masquerades as a 'religion', and seeks to eradicate and replace real religions, is perhaps getting a bit ahead of itself here. They haven't yet driven the Jews from Jerusalem. (The same Jerusalem that is mentioned some 700 times in the Bible, but not once in the koran.) The pedophile 'prophet' had no designs on Jerusalem, but his successors sure did, and still do. The 5,000 year history of the Jews in their holiest city is being rewritten by the same savages (with the help of their useful tools) that seek to replace the Catholics in Rome.
>>the gap between the rhetoric and the reality --stickman.
Exactly. They are diametrically opposed.
>>1. What determines a religion? If it includes a mandate to wage war against non-believers until the world is solely dar al harb, does dressing it up as the will of a deity mean it is a religion?
Brittania, I liked your post but think you mean "dar al-islam," not harb.
Y'know that residents of dar al-harb (us) are called "harbi's" and have no right to live? I'm going to go find the link.
Check this out:
A "harbi" as opposed to a dhimmi. A harbi has no rights, not even the right to live.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisions_of_the_world_in_Islam
And here is an American rejoinder in support of the Danish cartoonists:
http://www.236.com/news/2008/03/20/osama_to_world_were_still_touc_5292.php
As for The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, they can go suck a yellow lemon.
As for The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, they can go suck a yellow lemon.
Posted by: Jimmy Bones at March 21, 2008 7:17 PM
Suicidal dhimmis.
publicly kissing the Qur'an by the Pope isn't enough;
obsessively-compulsively condemning, and condemning and condemning the Danish cartoons by the Pope isn't enough;
the Pope standing on his knees before Islam isn't enough;
he must be down prostate.
Even if he does that, it will not matter when the Islamists decide that it is time to abolish the Hudaibiya.
Romiyya is the target, and the dhimmis are doing much of the work for their Islamist masters themselves, murdering Serb Christians and brutally eradicating Christianity from the Balkans.
Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999.