Jihad Commentary, Part One

The United States, together with the majority of Western and Eastern European countries, is a non-Muslim country. I certainly have no qualms speaking frankly about the prophet Muhammad, who by all accounts was a failed business man living on his wife's money while he enjoyed hashish-induced dreams. So why are we so concerned about Muslims' feelings? They seem to have absolutely no compunction about mistreating or insulting peoples of other faiths/cultures, yet we in the West can't even publish humourous cartoons of Mohammed? Muslims have no problems making statements calling for the death of Christians. but we non-Muslims somehow cannot speak out in defense of our faiths without being labelled 'racist'? Something has gone very wrong when non-Muslims can be slaughtered in the streets of their home (non-Islamic) countries merely for producing what Miuslims see as unacceptable but non-Muslims in those same countries cannot even speak out against the excesses of so many Muslim rites without fear of reprisal.

I was listening to Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch this morning on KSFO 560 AM, and he made the (true) point that Islam is unique among the world's religions in demanding that its adherents make war and forcibly take over (and convert or kill) the rest of the world. Jihad, or holy war, long pre-dates any modern explanation, and is in fact responsible for the Crusades, which were, after all, an attempt to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the bloodthirsty hordes that had sacked it.

Organized Christian sects such as Catholicism, for all their (Inquisition, etc) excesses, have never gone to the extent of calling for forcible conversion and conquest of the whole whorld. Nor is Christiasnity known as a top-down religion, Historically, it flowers among those on the bottom of society. Islam, on the other hand, is a top-down religion, and one that has tried on several separate occasions to take over Europe, beginning with the conquest of most of the Iberian peninsula in 715. These assaults intensified after the Ottoman Turks took the Christian kingdom of Constantinople in 1453. These assaults captured what is today Eastern Europe, and came very close to conquering all of Europe. The last of these continual attacks finally was defeated in 1683 before the gates of Vienna