My latest in PJ Media:
Establishment academic Walter Russell Mead, writing about the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the Wall Street Journal Monday, declared: “Movements like ISIS don’t spring from nowhere. It took centuries of decline, serial humiliations at the hands of arrogant European imperial powers, and decades of failed postcolonial governance to produce the toxic mixture of bigotry.”
Really? ISIS (and presumably other Islamic jihad terror groups) arise from “serial humiliations at the hands of arrogant European imperial powers, and decades of failed postcolonial governance”? No chance that “movements like ISIS’ might have sprung from Islamic texts such as these?
“And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from where they drove you out; persecution is worse than slaughter. But fight them not by the Holy Mosque until they should fight you there; then, if they fight you, kill them — such is the recompense of unbelievers, but if they give over, surely Allah is all-forgiving, all-compassionate. Fight them until there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s; then if they give over, there shall be no enmity save for evildoers.” (Qur’an 2:191-193)
“We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve for what they have associated with Allah of which He had not sent down authority. And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is the residence of the wrongdoers” (Qur’an 3:151).
“They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore do not take friends from among them, until they emigrate in the way of Allah; then, if they turn their backs, seize them and kill them wherever you find them; do not take for yourselves any one of them as friend or helper.” (Qur’an 4:89)….
Walter Russell Mead would likely reply that the Bible is full of violent passages, too, which is irrelevant to the question of what creates Islamic jihad terror groups, and would insist that there have been many periods during which Muslims were peaceful and evidently did not take the passages above literally. That, too, is false: there have been 14 centuries of uninterrupted jihad warfare, as you can see in The History of Jihad.
There is much more. Read the rest here.