Raymond Ibrahim in "Who is Telling the Truth about Islam?"

In "Who is Telling the Truth about Islam?" Wolff Bachner interviews me for the Inquisitr. A snippet follows:

WOLFF BACHNER:

Raymond, recently a study for the the U.S Office of Naval Research entitled “Identifying Terrorist Narratives and Counter-Narratives: Embedding Story Analysis in Expeditionary Units,” was published by several scholars at Arizona State University. They concluded that “Islamist extremists stress self-defense, not world domination.” After decades of violent terrorism and calls for the re-establishment of the caliphate, beginning in the modern era with the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 and the racist, antisemitic brutality of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti Of Jerusalem and his followers, non- Muslims still cling to the idea that Islam is a religion of peace. They hold to a demeaning belief that all the problems would disappear if we just helped the “poor Muslims” overcome their poverty and oppression.

Despite all the claims of Islam’s peaceful intentions, the Muslim Brotherhood now rules the Arab world’s most populous nation, Egypt, and its leader, Dr. Muhammad Badi had this to say, “The Imam (M.B. founder, Hassan al-Banna) delineated transitional goals and detailed methods to achieve this greatest objective, starting by reforming the individual, followed by building the family, the society, the government, and then a rightly guided caliphate and finally mastership of the world.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, who speak for the majority of Egyptians, as well as having great influence throughout the Muslim world, have been quite open, when speaking in Arabic, about their desire to make Islam the only religion in the world and that Islam should rule the entire planet under a new caliphate.

Who is telling the truth?. The leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that gave birth to Hamas and al-Qaeda or the so called “experts at the University of Arizona? Is Islam about social justice or world domination?

RAYMOND IBRAHIM:

Let me just offer you some facts, Wolff: In their voluminous literature—in their fatwas, treatises, books—these groups are unequivocally clear that their objective is domination—Islamic domination, the enforcement of Sharia law, and the subjugation of all infidels. Moreover, this domination is rooted in Islamic law, which commands that jihad be upheld in perpetuity until, in the words of the Koran, “all religion is for Allah” (8:39). For example, as the editor and translator of The Al Qaeda Reader, I am extremely well acquainted with the writings of Al Qaeda, especially the writings of the current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri (formerly of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood). In Al Qaeda’s Arabic writings that are directed to fellow Muslims, they make absolutely clear that hostility for all non-Muslims, including Americans and Israel, is a doctrinal matter decreed from on high for Muslims. It has nothing to do with whether non-Muslim nations are “fair” or “unfair” to Muslims; it has everything to do with the fact that they are non-Muslims—infidels, whom Muslims are doctrinally obligated to subjugate and humiliate. Indeed, Koran 9:29 even names the Christians and Jews, the “People of the Book,” as needing to be fought until they “pay tribute [jizya] and feel themselves utterly subdued.” Of course, Al Qaeda drops this rhetoric in its writings and communiqués directed to Western nations. Then, the theme is the one that the “experts” you cite have swallowed hook-line-and sinker—that Al Qaeda’s terror is in “retaliation” to Western foreign policy.

In fact, some years back, I juxtaposed the writings of Al Qaeda—primarily the late Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri—to show how they contradict themselves depending on whether they were talking to the West (“we attack you because you are unjust”) or whether they were talking to fellow Muslims (“we must attack the West because our religion commands it”). My findings, which I titled “An Analysis of Al-Qaeda’s Worldview: Reciprocal Treatment or Religious Obligation?” can be read here. At one point, bin Laden even asserts that “Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue… Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam… Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.”

As for the Muslim Brotherhood, it must be acknowledged that, if their tactics differ from Al Qaeda—the former primarily relies on non-violent propaganda, the latter on sheer violence—their goal is identical: the enforcement of Sharia law, with all the whippings, beheadings, amputations, sexual segregation, religious discrimination, death for apostates, and international hostility that entails. Western analysts and leaders seem to have fallen for the Muslim Brotherhood as the “alternative” to the “extreme radicals,” the Salafis like Al Qaeda, without realizing that the Muslim Brotherhood works incrementally, step by step, phase by phase, decade after decade to achieve its goal of Islamic domination. And just like Al Qaeda, the Brotherhood also has been vocal about its ultimate goal, “mastership of the world.”...