Fitzgerald: Nine things the police in Columbus, Ohio, need to know

“Topics [being taught the police in Columbus, Ohio by members of CAIR] covered included the basic beliefs and practices of Islam, practical advice to help future law enforcement personnel develop cultural competency when interacting with the Muslim community." -- from this article

What the police force in Columbus, Ohio and all over the country need to be taught is this:

1. They need to know what the texts of Islam -- Qur'an and Hadith and Sira -- inculcate in Believers about non-Muslims, and in particular, about the central notion that Islam, an entirely worldly faith possessing both a politics and geopolitics, is destined, by right, to dominate everywhere. As Omar Ahmad, the chairman of the board of CAIR noted, truthfully in 1998 -- he was speaking to fellow Muslims, after all, unaware that his words were being heard by non-Muslims -- “Islam is not in America to be equal to any other religion but to be dominant."

2. They need in particular to focus on how to understand what Muslims make of the Qur’an, especially those verses that appear vague or impenetrable, or that may on the surface appear to be endowed with a meaning that they do not, in fact, possess. See, for instance, 2:256 (“There is no compulsion in religion”). Both Muslim commentaries and the behavior of Muslims toward those who wish to leave Islam, as well as toward non-Muslims, indicate that when those non-Muslims are under Muslim dominance, they are faced with death, forcible conversion, or a weak form of forcible conversion, which comes from the desire to avoid the status of dhimmi -- that is avoid permanent humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity.

3. The police force in Columbus, Ohio needs to learn what the word “Jihad” means for Muslims. The only way to do that is to study what Muslim commentators over the past 1350 years, and Western scholars in the Golden Age of uninhibited scholarship (roughly, from 1870 to 1970), and apostates or defectors from Islam bear witness to today, when they all tell us that Jihad in its widely accepted sense means warring against and subjugating Infidels. See what Muslims say every day, all over the world, when they are not talking to audiences of gullible Infidels visiting a Mosque on Outreach Night, or not to police officers being required to endure being “trained” in Islam by very cunning members of a local chapter of CAIR.

4. The police in Columbus need to understand the significance of Muhammad, a figure who is absolutely indispensable to understanding the mental makeup of Believers in Islam. Muhammad is both the Model of Conduct, uswa hasana, and the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil. And he remains that Model of Conduct, that Perfect Man, to be emulated in all things, for all time.

The police need, then, to find out what Muhammad did and said, and they can do so by becoming acquainted with the record of what he said and did known as the Hadith (properly, ahadith). But they first need a simple introduction to how the Hadith have been collected and collated, and winnowed, long ago, by study of the chain of oral transmission (A said to B said to C said to D), known as the isnad-chain, a study conducted by men known as muhaddithin, who then assigned levels of “authenticity” to each Hadith (and threw out many as completely made-up). Several of these muhaddithin were thought to be more reliable and trustworthy than others. The most important are Al-Bukhari and Muslim. When Muslims ask for advice on this or that matter, the Muslim cleric who answers them, laying down the law as to What Is Commanded and What Is Prohibited, does so by copious quotation not only from the Qur’an, but also, in many cases, from the Hadith.

The word “Sunnah” – as in that oft-used phrase “Qur’an and Sunnah” – is the accepted practice for Muslims, and also serves as an authoritative gloss on the Qur’an and helps to explain some of its denser passages. It refers to the understandings and customs and manners and ways of the earliest Muslims. The Sunnah is derived, in the main, from what has been written down in the Hadith and the Sira (which are the biographies of Muhammad written by the earliest Muslims).

5. The police need to know more about this Perfect Man and Model of Conduct, Muhammad, and also to understand that his example remains absolutely relevant today. For example, one of the very first acts of Khomeini, when he came to power, was to have the marriageable age of girls reduced to nine years, because that was the age of little Aisha when Muhammad, the Perfect Man, had sexual intercourse with her, thus consummating their “marriage.”

6. Among the important events in Muhammad’s life of which the police in Columbus, Ohio should be made aware are the decapitation of the bound prisoners (600 to 900) of the Banu Qurayza; the delight Muhammad took when informed of the murder of Asma bint Marwan, a woman who had written some satirical verses about him; the delight Muhammad took in the death of Abu Afak, for similar reasons; the attack on the inoffensive Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis, in order to obtain loot and women; the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya, made with the Meccans in 628 A.D. and breached, as soon as Muhammad felt his side had grown sufficiently strong, some 18 months later; and other events of equal importance in the life of this warrior who was engaged in 78 military campaigns against those who, because they refused to submit to Islam (or were not even given the chance to submit, as in the case of the Khaybar farmers), were fair game.

7. The police in Columbus, Ohio need to know how deeply a part of Islam is the principle and the practice of Deception. It gets its approval from Muhammad himself, who said that “war is deception.” Those who believe that Islam and Christianity have “so much in common” because they are 1) both monotheisms and both described as 2) abrahamic faiths (meaning that each has a figure named Abraham, but that figure, and what he does, and the meaning of his story, is very different in the Qur’an from what it is in the Bible) should look closely at the figures of Jesus and Muhammad and see if there is any overlap at all between them. There is nothing of the warrior, sword in hand, of Jesus. Jesus never witnessed, with pleasure, the decapitation of bound prisoners; never was pleased to learn of the murder, on his behalf, of anyone who had mocked him or refused to listen to him. Jesus never led raids and took one-fifthy of the booty in property and in women; Jesus never married and had sexual intercourse with a nine-year-old girl. And Jesus never told his followers to slay the Unbelievers, wherever they found them.

Nor did Jesus ever say, as Muhammad did, that “war is deception.” The police of Columbus, Ohio are going to have trouble finding a statement by the former that says anything like “war is deception.” There is no similarity at all between Jesus and Muhammad). They need to know about “taqiyya” which is merely religiously-sanctioned deception, sanctioned because it is intended to protect Believers and Islam itself. While it has its origins in Shi’a Islam (and the need to be protected against Sunnis), it is founded in the Qur’an (3:28, 16:106) and as such cannot be consigned to Shi’ism alone.

8. The police force of Columbus, Ohio needs to know that wherever Muslims ruled, they killed vast numbers of resisting non-Muslims. In India, the number of Hindus killed in the several centuries of Muslim rule has been estimated as some 60-70 million. The best non-Muslims could hope for was to endure, as Christians and Jews, the status of “People of the Book” (Ahl al-Kitab). They were treated, as the Muslims like to say, as the “Protected People.” This meant they were “protected” from the Muslims themselves, as long as they fulfilled a host of obligations to their Muslim masters, including payment of a special tax, the Jizyah, that essentially funded the Muslim state for many centuries. This tax was not a trivial one, but onerous (as S. D. Goitein discovered in his decades of studying the Jewish community in Cairo through the papers of the Cairo Geniza). And there were many other requirements: riding only a donkey, not a horse (equivalent to being prevented from riding in a car today), dismounting whenever a Muslim approached, not building new religious structures or repairing old ones without the express permission – often withheld – of Muslim authorities, not building on ground higher than any nearby mosque, not having the testimony of a non-Muslim equal to that of a Muslim, not being allowed to marry a Muslim girl, though Muslim men could and did marry non-Muslim women, and so on. The phrase “protected peoples” is as mendacious as is the repeated invocation of the business of the “three abrahamic faiths,” a concept which, when properly analyzed, proves to be meaningless, or worse.

9. The police force of Columbus, Ohio needs to find out who, in the force or in the political structure, has caused them to have to learn about Islam from professional and sinister propagandists who are determined to prevent them, those policemen in Columbus, Ohio, and all others with whom they come into contact, of finding out about Islam – that is, finding out the kind of thing that is set out for you policemen to read and study right now. But don’t let the CAIR representatives know, and if you read “Islam For Infidels” to find out more, you can talk amongst yourselves -- but don’t let anyone sympathetic to the Muslim propagandists to whom you will be subjected in on your other sources of information until you have thoroughly digested that material.

There. That’s nine things to think about.

I could add a dozen or five dozen more. And so could you, and will you, once you begin to discover for yourselves, without any sly interlocutor to direct you, about the meaning, and full menace, of Islam.

Posted by Hugh at December 2, 2008 11:18 AM
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