In “#MyJihad: CAIR”s New Twitter Campaign to Whitewash Islam” at PJMedia today, I expose the dishonesty and hypocrisy of Hamas-linked CAIR’s cynical new ad and Twitter campaign to confuse Americans about the meaning of the word jihad:
Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
Lady Macbeth could have been describing the cynical new ad campaign
sponsored by the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR), which attempts to make Americans believe that “jihad” is all
about taking the kids to school and smiling at surly checkout clerks,
rather than flying planes into office buildings and blowing up pizza
parlors full of infidels.Like all Big Lies, it has a grain of truth to it. Jihad in Arabic
means “struggle,” and the Arabic word carries as many connotations as
does the English one. One may struggle to lose weight or to exercise
regularly, and the same word is used for great struggles, such as those
against Nazism and Communism. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a
Department of Agricultural Jihad, which has nothing to do with blowing
up farm implements, but merely concerns itself with the struggle to
increase crop yields.And so Ahmed Rehab of Hamas-linked CAIR asserted to one of a seemingly endless stream of eagerly credulous reporters:
Jihad in Islam simply means the struggle to a better
place. Whatever barrier or burdens that you have in your life, you are
asked, you are tasked to muster in the inner courage, the inner resolve,
the inner determination to overcome those personal barriers, personal
issues.Rehab retailed a half-truth. A manual of Islamic law certified by the
highest authority in Sunni Islam, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, as
conforming “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community”
explained: “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is
etymologically derived from the word mujahada signifying
warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for
the greater jihad, it is spiritual warfare against the lower self
(nafs).” After thus acknowledging the spiritual, “greater jihad,” the
manual never mentions it again, but goes on for many paragraphs about
the “lesser jihad,” that “war against non-Muslims,” giving rules for the
taking of prisoners, the legal status of captive women, the subjugation
of the infidels, and more.This legal manual stipulates that Muslims must make war “upon Jews,
Christians, and Zoroastrians”¦until they become Muslim or pay the
non-Muslim poll tax.” It specifies that the warfare against non-Muslims
must continue until “the final descent of Jesus.” After that, “nothing
but Islam will be accepted from them.”Another manual of Islamic law, from the Hanafi school of Islamic
jurisprudence, repeats the same injunctions. It insists that people must
receive the call to embrace Islam before being fought, “because the
Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the
infidels to the faith.” However, “if the infidels, upon receiving the
call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it
is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to
make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve
Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary
to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands
us so to do.”Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering Muslim historian and
philosopher, wrote that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a
religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and
(the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or
by force.” In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is
concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to
gain power over other nations.”