“My Journey Toward Islamoawareness” was posted by Lawrence Meyers at Big Peace on May 21 (thanks to all who sent this in), but Meyers explains that “a friend who works in Hollywood penned this essay which I thought would be of interest to BigPeace readers. He would gladly have contributed it directly, but as he works in Hollywood, he is concerned about the “non-existent” blacklist, and asked that I post it for him.” What this Hollywood guy calls “Islamoawareness” is exactly the same thing that I was trying to sum up in a word I coined some time ago, “Islamorealism”: a clear-sighted antidote to “Islamophobia” and Islamophobophobia.
I use the term “Islamoawareness” because people who are critical of Islamic doctrine are often smeared as “Islamophobes”. I reject this label because a “phobia” is an irrational fear of something, but to fear something that is, indeed, out to kill you is the height of rationality.
I started this journey after 9/11, but not immediately after. As shocked as I was that nearly 3,000 lives were brutally snuffed out by Islamic terrorists, I bought the line that George Bush and Tony Blair parroted; namely, that Islam is a “religion of peace” that had been “hijacked” by extremists. So, I dismissed Osama bin Laden as nothing more than a homicidal extremist, and I really didn’t examine it any deeper.
But then I happened to see a billboard on Sunset Blvd. around May 2005. The billboard had some words on it I had never seen before, including “dhimmitude”, “Eurabia” and “Bat Y’eor”, and the address of a website, jihadwatch.org. (You can see the billboard here.)
That was our Jihad Watch billboard from six years ago!
Naturally curious, I wanted to know what these new words meant, so that night I Googled “dhimmitude”, and my journey to Islamoawareness officially began. I visited the Jihadwatch website, found out about Robert Spencer, started to read his books, got a copy of the Qu’ran to verify the verses he was quoting, and read many other books besides. […]
I learned about Muhammad; how he is held as an “excellent example of conduct” (33:21) for Muslims to follow even today, but then I learned the historical record (in the hadith; the collections of his doings and sayings, and in biographies written by pious Muslims) shows that he owned slaves, raped the female ones (in a couple of cases shortly after having their husbands killed), robbed caravans, tortured a man to find out where he hid his treasure–by building a fire on his chest, married a 6 year-old, and had sex with her when she was 9–and he struck her, too. He had all the men of an entire tribe slaughtered, and had his critics assassinated. And these are excellent examples of conduct?
And I learned a whole new vocabulary: “jihad”, “kaffir”, “dhimmi”, “dhimmitude”, “jizya, “taquiya”, “ijtihad”, “abrogation”, “nakbha”, “hijira”, and “lan astaslem”….
Read it all. And check out his reading list:
Here’s the bibliography that has led me to my conclusions about Islam:
–The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades by Robert Spencer (2005)
–Islam Unveiled by Robert Spencer (2003)
–The Truth About Muhammad by Robert Spencer (2007)
–Stealth Jihad by Robert Spencer (2008)
–Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2008)
–Because They Hate by Bridget Gabriel (2008)
–My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (2008)
–Why I Am Not A Muslim by Ibn Warraq (2003)…