Mainstream counterterror analysts such as the earnestly befuddled Max Abrahms constantly assure us that the Islamic State is not Islamic and that jihadis are ignorant of Islam. They never explain, because they cannot explain, how it is that jihadis believe themselves to be the exponents of true and authentic Islam, if they’re getting it all so terribly wrong. In any case, here is yet another example of these non-Islamic Muslims behaving as if Islam were very, very, important to them. What a paradox! What a mystery!
“Syria: Freed Yezidi women and children recount time under ISIS,” Ruptly, March 11, 2019 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
Freed Yezidi women and children from Iraq recounted their time as prisoners and slaves of the self-proclaimed Islamic State ISIS on Friday and Saturday, after reportedly being rescued by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from the final ISIS-held enclave near Baghouz on Thursday.
Twenty-two-year-old Selwa Seydo and 20-year-old Teysir Sileman Hussein, freed Yezidi women from Iraq’s Shingal District, recounted their time as ISIS prisoners while speaking from the Syrian village of al-Suwar, Deir ez-Zor Governorate on Friday.
Seydo shared how she had been captured by ISIS alongside her mother, sister and brother, before “some Iraqi came to me and said he would take me for himself. I cried, I said I did not want this but there was nothing I could do.”
“We stayed in Mosul for around 10 months. When he and his family had issues with ISIS, ISIS took me from him and brought me back to Raqqa. I was, of course, a handmaid to them,” she added.
Hussein remembered how she was only 14 when ISIS arrived in her village and “gave us 15 days to become Muslim. They were approaching men and women and telling them to become Muslims.”…
Michael Copeland says
“They were approaching men and women and telling them to become Muslims.”
Yazidi woman
“Does Islam or does it not force people by the power of the sword to submit….? Yes.”
Osama bin Laden
“By persuasion or by force”
Ibn Khaldun
Rarely says
It is important to understand that people can be so inhumane and evil. People who don’t understand that are easily duped and make bad decisions. If there was ever a need to justify teaching people at an early age about things like the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and other mass murdering in our recent past this is it. Burning witches at the stake, the Spanish Inquisition, the ravaging hordes of Attila the Hun are too easily viewed as ancient history that mankind has advanced from when nothing could be further from the truth as evidenced by things like the plight of the Yazidis. The evils of the past are with us today.
Ask any high schooler when WWII occurred and you are as likely to be answered with: “You mean there were two of them?” as not. History, with all its cruelty and evil, must be taught if we are to avoid the naivety so pronounced in our Universities and High Schools today. ” Political correctness ” blinds our Society and prevents taking lessons from the past.
gravenimage says
Yazidi prisoner freed from the Islamic State says jihadis “gave us 15 days to become Muslim”
………………..
And yet, Taqiyya artists continue to claim that “there is no compulsion in religion”…
somehistory says
Three doors: choose the door is the command given to most never moslims when captured by moslims.
Convert, pay extortion, die.
This young woman had no money, so she was not given that choice. Fifteen days is not a long time to live. To be a captive slave of a moslim terrorist for any length of time has to seem like an eternity.
Back in the day when Diane Sawyer went to afghanistan, donned a burka and walked along the dusty streets with her photographer…the truth of the way women and girls are treated was somewhat exposed. People felt sorry and wanted to help. Times certainly have changed. Only the persecutors and murderers and rapists are believed and “helped” and given “understanding.”
don vito says
Yazidis had live with moslems for years, perhaps decades, perhaps centuries before the 2014 Caliphate came into being. Yazidis and moslems were neighbors and knew each other, worked, lived, and raised their families in the same neighborhoods. Were these moslems trustworthy? Were these moslems civilized? Were these moslems true moslems? Did these moslems go to mosk and pray to allah 5 times a day? No one knew, all people just carried on with their lives as they always had. Nothing would ever change in the neighborhoods……until the 2014 Caliphate came into being.
gravenimage says
Except that Yazidis have indeed been oppressed and murdered for centuries–as have Christians and other Infidels in Dar-al-Islam, including Iraq and Syria. They suffered greatly under the Ottoman Empire. In the 2007 Mosul Massacre twenty-three Yazidis on a bus were shot to death after being separated out from Muslim passengers.
ISIS just stepped up these horrors.
don vito says
This is what I had in mind, ”
Raymond Ibrahim
Middle East and Islam specialist
When Muslims Betray Non-Muslim Friends and Neighbors
07/08/2015 by Raymond Ibrahim 34 Comments
Portuguese
Let believers not take for friends and allies infidels rather than believers: and whoever does this shall have no relationship left with Allah—unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions – Koran 3:28
Days ago, after the Islamic State [IS] entered the Syrian city of Hassakè, prompting a mass exodus of Christians, a familiar, though often overlooked scene, took place: many otherwise “normal” Muslims joined ranks with IS, instantly turning on their longtime Christian neighbors.
This is the third category of Muslims that lurks between “moderates” and “radicals”: “sleepers,” Muslims who appear “moderate” but who are merely waiting for circumstances to turn to Islam’s advantage before they join the jihad; Muslims who are waiting for the rewards of jihad to become greater than the risks.
There is no lack of examples of these types of Muslims. The following are testimonials from non-Muslims, mostly Christian refuges from those regions of Iraq and Syria now under Islamic State (or other jihadi) control. Consider what they say about their longtime Sunni neighbors who appeared “moderate”—or at least nonviolent—but who, once the jihad came to town, exposed their true colors:
Georgios, a man from the ancient Christian town of Ma‘loula—one of the few areas in the world where the language of Christ was still spoken—told of how Muslim neighbors he knew all his life turned on the Christians after al-Nusra, another jihadi outfit, invaded in 2013:
We knew our Muslim neighbours all our lives. Yes, we knew the Diab family were quite radical, but we thought they would never betray us. We ate with them. We are one people.
A few of the Diab family had left months ago and we guessed they were with the Nusra [al-Qaeda front]. But their wives and children were still here. We looked after them. Then, two days before the Nusra attacked, the families suddenly left the town. We didn’t know why. And then our neighbours led our enemies in among us.
The Christian man explained with disbelief how he saw a young member of the Diab family whom he knew from youth holding a sword and leading foreign jihadis to Christian homes. Continues Georgios:
We had excellent relations. It never occurred to us that Muslim neighbours would betray us. We all said “please let this town live in peace — we don’t have to kill each other.” But now there is bad blood. They brought in the Nusra to throw out the Christians and get rid of us forever. Some of the Muslims who lived with us are good people but I will never trust 90 per cent of them again.
A teenage Christian girl from Homs, Syria—which once had a Christian population of approximately 80,000, but which is now reportedly zero—relates her story:
We left because they were trying to kill us. . . . They wanted to kill us because we were Christians. They were calling us Kaffirs [infidels], even little children saying these things. Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house. I’ve kept in touch with the few Christian friends left back home, but I cannot speak to my Muslim friends any more. I feel very sorry about that. (Crucified Again, p. 207)
When asked who exactly threatened and drove Christians out of Mosul, which fell to the Islamic State a year ago, another anonymous Christian refugee responded:
We left Mosul because ISIS came to the city. The [Sunni Muslim] people of Mosul embraced ISIS and drove the Christians out of the city. When ISIS entered Mosul, the people hailed them and drove out the Christians….
The people who embraced ISIS, the people who lived there with us… Yes, my neighbors. Our neighbors and other people threatened us. They said: “Leave before ISIS get you.” What does that mean? Where would we go?… Christians have no support in Iraq. Whoever claims to be protecting the Christians is a liar. A liar!
Nor is such Muslim treachery limited to Christians. Other “infidels,” Yazidis for example, have experienced the same betrayal. Discussing IS invasion of his village, a 68-year-old Yazidi man who managed to flee the bloody offensive—which included the slaughter of many Yazidi men and enslavement of women and children—said:
The (non-Iraqi) jihadists were Afghans, Bosnians, Arabs and even Americans and British fighters…. But the worst killings came from the people living among us, our (Sunni) Muslim neighbours…. The Metwet, Khawata and Kejala tribes—they were all our neighbours. But they joined the IS, took heavy weapons from them, and informed on who was Yazidi and who was not. Our neighbours made the IS takeover possible.
Likewise, watch this 60 Minute interview with a Yazidi woman. When asked why people she knew her whole life would suddenly join IS and savagely turn on her people, she replied:
I can’t tell you exactly, but it has to be religion. It has to be religion. They constantly asked us to convert, but we refused. Before this, they never mentioned it. Prior, we thought of each other as family. But I say, it has to be religion.
Lest it seem that this phenomenon of Sunni betrayal is limited to Islamic jihad in Mesopotamia, know that it has occurred historically and currently in other nations. The following anecdote from the Ottoman Empire is over 100 years old:
Then one night, my husband came home and told me that the padisha [sultan] had sent word that we were to kill all the Christians in our village, and that we would have to kill our neighbours. I was very angry, and told him that I did not care who gave such orders, they were wrong. These neighbours had always been kind to us, and if he dared to kill them Allah would pay us out. I tried all I could to stop him, but he killed them — killed them with his own hand. (Sir Edwin Pears, Turkey and Its People, London: Methuen and Co., 1911, p. 39)
And in Nigeria—a nation that shares little with Syria, Iraq, or Turkey, other than Islam—a jihadi attack on Christians that left five churches destroyed and several Christians killed was enabled by “local Muslims”:
The Muslims in this town were going round town pointing out church buildings and shops owned by Christians to members of Boko Haram, and they in turn bombed these churches and shops.
Such similar patterns of traitorous behavior—patterns that cross continents and centuries, patterns that regularly appear whenever Muslims live alongside non-Muslims—are easily understood by turning to Koran 3:28:
Let believers [Muslims] not take infidels [non-Muslims] for friends and allies instead of believers. Whoever does this shall have no relationship left with Allah—unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions. But Allah cautions you [to fear] Himself. For the final goal is to Allah.
Here is how Islam’s most authoritative ulema and exegetes explain Koran 3:28:
Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari (d. 923), author of a standard and authoritative commentary of the Koran, writes:
If you [Muslims] are under their [non-Muslims’] authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them with your tongue while harboring inner animosity for them … [know that] Allah has forbidden believers from being friendly or on intimate terms with the infidels rather than other believers—except when infidels are above them [in authority]. Should that be the case, let them act friendly towards them while preserving their religion.
Ibn Kathir (d. 1373), another prime authority on the Koran, writes:
The Most High said, “[U]nless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions”—that is, whoever at any time or place fears their evil may protect himself through outward show—not sincere conviction. As al-Bukhari records through Abu al-Darda the words [of the Prophet], “Truly, we grin to the faces of some peoples, while our hearts curse them.”
In other words, Muslims are not to befriend non-Muslims, unless circumstances are such that it is in the Muslims’ interests to do so. For example, if Muslims are a minority (as in America), or if their leaders brutally crack down on jihadi activities (as in Bashar Assad’s pre-Islamic State Syria): then they may preach and even feign peace, tolerance and coexistence with their non-Muslim neighbors.
However, if and when circumstances to make Islam supreme appear, Muslims are expected to join the jihad—“for the final goal is to Allah.”[1]