Since September 11, 2001, there have been 35,000 terrorist attacks around the world. Virtually all of them were orchestrated by Muslims. Before 9/11 I’d rarely studied Islam and knew only elementary facts about Muslim history, so I then read and reviewed a number of books. Considering the brutal attack of Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023, I’ve decided to republish three of those reviews (with some slight updating). To understand what motivates Islamic Jihadists one should read first-hand accounts such as Brigitte Gabriel’s Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, c. 2006), that give specificity to events in the Middle East. Born in Lebanon, when it was still a peaceful, prosperous, predominantly Christian country, she witnessed the chaos and destruction that followed the Islamic Palestinians’ invasion of her homeland 40 years ago. Living in the United States, she wrote this book to warn Americans “that what happened to me and my country of birth could, terrifyingly, happen here in America” (p. 2). We simply must know this: “The main objective in the radical Islamists’ strategy to dominate the world is the destruction of the United States. They know that if America, the keystone, falls, then the arch of Western civilization will collapse” (p. 169).
The only child of elderly, prosperous parents in southern Lebanon, Gabriel enjoyed (for a decade) an idyllic childhood, blessed with parties, religious holidays, good schools, and friendly neighbors. Things changed rapidly, however, as the nation’s “open door” immigration policies allowed thousands of Palestinians to enter the country. Following the successful establishment of the nation of Israel, growing numbers of Palestinians lived in PLO refugee camps in Jordan and launched terrorist raids against Israel. Weary of their troublesome presence, Jordan’s King Hussein expelled them in 1970. Subsequently, “Lebanon was the only one of twenty-two Arab countries that was willing to open its borders to a third wave of Palestinian refugees” (p. 18). These refugees quickly seized control of their host country. Gabriel’s home and village, located near the Israeli border, were reduced to rubble as Muslims routinely shelled it. “To a ten year old, all this—the civil war and the attack against us—was bewildering. Just as people asked ‘Why do they hate us?’ after 9/11, one evening I asked my father, ‘Why did they do this to us?’ He took a long breath and paused, deeply concerned about what he was about to say. ‘The Muslims bombed us because we are Christians. They want us dead because they hate us’” (p. 33). To Americans mystified by the terrorists’ attacks on 9/11—and by the Muslims’ rejoicing thereafter—she says: “There is a three-word answer that is both simple and complex: because they hate. They hate our way of life. They hate our freedom. They hate our democracy. They hate the practice of every religion but their own. They don’t just disagree. They hate” (p. 145).
In 1982 Israeli troops occupied southern Lebanon and brought blessed peace to Gabriel’s region. It was a military action bringing what Europe experienced when the Nazis were defeated in 1945. Protected by Israeli soldiers, she and her neighbors moved about freely and rebuilt their lives. When her mother became seriously ill, Jewish military medical personnel took her to a hospital in Israel, where she received first-class treatment. In that hospital a lifetime of anti-Jewish prejudice drained away from Gabriel. The Israelis were even treating Islamic terrorists! “I realized at that moment,” she says, “that I had been sold a fabricated lie by my government and culture about the Jews and Israel that was far from reality. I knew for a fact, as someone raised in the Arab world, that if I had been a Jew in an Arab hospital, I would have been lynched and then thrown to the ground, and joyous shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ would have echoed through the hospital and the surrounding streets” (p. 79).
In that Jewish hospital, Gabriel volunteered to serve as a translator. This led in time to a job with a Jerusalem television station, where she worked for six years. There the contrast between Judaism and Islam was striking. On the Jewish side, “you see order, structure, cleanliness, and beautiful flowers planted everywhere” (p. 103). A block away, in the Muslim section, dirt and disorder prevailed. The “clash of civilizations” shone forth every day in Jerusalem. At work, helping prepare daily newscasts, the clash seemed overwhelmingly clear, and she “began to realize that the Arab Muslim world, because of its religion and culture, is a natural threat to civilized people of the world, particularly Western Civilization” (p. 105). Working as a journalist, Gabriel saw the astoundingly favorable treatment Western media gave homicidal thugs like Yasser Arafat. Ever portraying the Palestine Liberation Organization in positive ways—and Israelis as villains—American journalists greatly helped the jihadists. “Unable to defeat Western military superiority, our enemy depends on negative themes throughout the media to create disunity, opening schisms on the home front in our communities, on our campuses, and in our government” (p. 111). Noting that “General Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of North Vietnam’s army, was asked why America was defeated in Vietnam. He said: ‘America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win’” (p. 112). In our “fight against Islamo-fascism” these words should give us pause. Living in Jerusalem, she watched foreign TV “journalists” who “blew in, blew around, and blew out. They came with their preconceived ideas, toed the network editorial policy line, and perpetuated,” albeit unconsciously, the “subtle Arab and PLO propaganda, which had reached them wherever they came from.” They loved to photograph “wailing Palestinians” and “kids throwing stones against border patrol soldiers firing tear gas and rubber bullets. Because I could speak the language and read the Arabic press and knew the nuances behind events, I sensed that reporters were being manipulated” (p. 119). Thus it was with a both amazement and anger that Gabriel “watched the West fall further under the spell of anti-West, anti-Israeli propaganda, just as it did during its coverage of Lebanon, which portrayed the Palestinians and Islamo-fascists as the victims instead of the aggressors” (p. 119).
Gabriel was alarmed by this because she had carefully observed developments in the Middle East—and America’s response to them—since 1975. When, in the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran, President Jimmy Carter “alternately groveled and bungled, Ayatollah Khomeini exultingly proclaimed, ‘America cannot do a damn thing!’ This became a slogan and a battle cry throughout the Middle East” (p. 125). Though markedly different from Carter in many ways, President Ronald Reagan behaved similarly in Lebanon. When Hezbollah (subsidized and controlled by Iran) “blew up the marines in Lebanon in 1983, America turned tail and ran, leaving the Christians to be slaughtered in town after town. It sent a strong, loud, and clear message to the Muslim radicals of the world, including Osama bin Laden: America is no longer the power it used to be” (p. 125). That being so, Sudanese Muslims, in 1983, launched a genocidal “jihad to impose Islam on black African Christians and animists in the southern part of the country” (p. 125). Some two million innocent people were killed within a decade.
She further provided brief accounts of other Islamic aggressions since 1979. It’s a world-wide phenomenon with enormous implications. And it’s taking place within the United States as well. Radical Muslims, funded by Saudi Arabian petrodollars, are working hard to Islamize this country, though they present a benign face to the public. “Masquerading as a civil rights organization,” for example, CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) “has had a hidden agenda to Islamize America from the start” (p. 138). Gabriel documents and laments the degree to which Saudi money and compliant professors have established influential footholds for radical Islam on many university campuses. To deal with this threat, at home and abroad, reading this book, with its many suggestions concerning what to do, is most helpful.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
An equally readable book, addressing the same issue and coming to basically the same conclusion, though from a markedly different perspective, is Nonie Darwish’s Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror (New York: Sentinel, c. 2006). Darwish was born into an elite Egyptian family, and her father was a highly placed officer in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s army, considered “one of the most brilliant analytical minds found in the Egyptian military” by an Israeli historian (p. 255). Unfortunately, he was assassinated by Israeli agents while stationed in Gaza in 1956. In death, however, he became a celebrated “shahid,” a martyr for Islam, a national hero. Subsequently, the family settled in Cairo, where Darwish received an excellent education in a Catholic girls’ school and then the American University in Cairo. She enjoyed the unique economic and social privileges of her class. But she was also fully immersed in the culture of Islam. From the radio, as well as the mosques, came “calls to war and songs praising President Nasser. Arab leaders were treated as gods and they acted as gods” (p. 33). The call for jihad was ubiquitous. “No Arab could avoid the culture of jihad. Jihad is not some esoteric concept. In the Arab world, the meaning of jihad is clear: It is a religious holy war against infidels, an armed struggle against anyone who is not a Muslim” (p. 33). Yet she found herself inwardly torn by some of the incongruities of her world, especially when dealing with “marriage and family dynamics.” She managed to avoid the arranged marriages expected of Muslim women. And she observed that “at the heart of Islamic fundamentalism lies the most precious and important object, the woman. She is the source of pride or shame to the Muslim man who rules and is ruled by the most despotic, tyrannical, and humiliating forms of governments on earth” (p. 66). Muslim men’s “honor is totally dependent on their female blood relatives” (p. 66). Personal honor and integrity are not particularly important. It’s their women that establish their “honor”!
Darwish also struggled with the reality of polygamy and its power in Islamic culture. Married women fear their husbands will take a second wife—often secret liaisons divulged only at the man’s death, when his estate must be divided among all his wives. Muslim women, consequently, distrust both their husbands and any single women who might attract them. Then there is the “temporary marriage,” also known as “pleasure marriage,” empowering men to have one-night stands, “usually in exchange for money (calling it a dowry), and still feel that it is acceptable in the eyes of God” (p. 68). Men may easily divorce their wives, whereas women must beg (often unsuccessfully) for a dissolution of a dysfunctional union. Consequently, Darwish found “very few happy marriages around me” (p. 79). As a single woman Darwish worked for several years at the English desk of the Middle East News Agency. This gave her a unique perspective on the world and also occasionally allowed her to travel abroad. She became aware of a world quite different from that described by the Egyptian media. She also made friends with Copts—Christian Egyptians who had suffered for centuries. In fact she fell in love with and married a Coptic man, with whom she immigrated to the United States in 1978.
Landing in Los Angeles, she acknowledges that she “loved America even before seeing it” (p. 113). She found Americans friendly and helpful, courteous, hard-working, generous and honest—virtues largely absent in Egypt. She worked for a Jewish businessman and found that most everything she had heard about Jews in Egypt was wrong. “I asked myself, Why the hate? What purpose does it serve? What are Arabs afraid of?” Indeed, she concluded: “The Arab-Israel conflict is not a crisis over land, but a crisis of hate, lack of compassion, ingratitude, and insecurity” (p. 126). American women differed from the women she’d grown up around. They were supportive of each other, complimenting and helping in various ways. “Moving to America,” she says, in a memorable passage, “was like being catapulted to another time in history. America for me was not just a place for making money, having a job, a house, and car, it was a place for becoming a human being” (p. 130).
Part of that process was religious. Though she remained a Muslim she hungered for an authentically personal relationship with God. “The truth is that most Muslims are a part of ‘political Islam’ rather than a religion and a personal relationship with God” (p. 136). Islam, for her (and most Muslims) is a matter of birth and politics. Mosques are mainly for men, whom women are expected to obey. To her dismay, she found “that rabid anti-American feeling is rampant in the majority of U.S. mosques, where Muslims are encouraged to stand out as mujahadeen in America” (p. 140). Using America’s democratic processes, these Muslims seek to ultimately control the nation. Knowing the history of Islam, Darwish says: “The current onslaught against our society is nothing new. Conquering the world for Islam has been going on since the seventh century using pretty much the same tactics” (p. 144).
In time, Darwish had rejected her family’s religion, Islam. One Sunday morning she was watching a Christian preacher on TV who was expounding the love chapter in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. She heard about “the love of God I was desperate for but was unable to find in my culture of origin” (p. 160). Her daughter came in and announced that the TV preacher pastored the church that sponsored the Christian school she attended. So Darwish determined to visit the church the following Sunday. She did and heard “a message of compassion, love, acceptance, tolerance, and prayer for all of humanity” (p. 159). This message differed radically from Muslim preachers’ hate-filled diatribes, urging hearers to “destroy the infidels.” At that moment, sitting for the first time in that Christian church, this Muslim woman “was faced with a challenge, nothing less than the choice between love and hate” (p. 159). She made a decision, and it made a difference. Evaluating this, she writes: “Many immigrants come to this great nation in search of material gain, which is fine; however, the biggest prize I gained was my religious freedom and learning to love. For me it was nothing short of cataclysmic. I had turned from a culture of hatred to one of love” (p. 161). Though still nominally a Muslim, her God is not a jihadist!
Her new perspective provides readers a lens with which to evaluate developments in the Middle East. When she made a brief trip to Egypt (arriving home in L.A. the night before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2002, she saw again the deadening hand of Islam upon her land. She heard again the lies about the Jews. She sensed the irrational anti-Americanism promoted by the media, including the only U.S. media outlet available to Egyptians, CNN! “To my surprise,” she says, CNN contributed to Arab hatred and suspicion of America by regularly criticizing America and President Bush” (p. 175). She noted the pernicious impact of money from Saudi Arabia, funding radical jihadists. And she sorrowed at the injurious impact of Islam upon the nation’s women, including many in her own family.
Mystified at the silence of allegedly “moderate” Muslims who failed to denounce the jihadists, Darwish began writing and speaking, trying to inform America about the threat of radical Islam. “In the Arab world,” she insists, “there is only one meaning for jihad, and that is: a religious holy war against infidels” (p. 201). That’s what we now face everywhere. Portraying Islam as a peaceful religion “can only bring disaster between the two worlds” (p. 202). She especially critiqued America’s universities, where Muslims are afforded unusual support and easily propagandize naïve students. “The war of words and propaganda,” she warned, “could be as vital as the actual military war” (p. 211). The message she declared is clear. “After 9/11, my fellow Americans should never be in the dark again. They must understand the brutality and persistence of their enemy” (p. 212). Radical Muslims intend to conquer the world “and to usher in a Caliphate—that is, a supreme totalitarian Islamic government” (p. 212). They will do anything possible to accomplish this goal. “They are willing to bring about an Armageddon to conquer the world to Islam. We are already in world War III and many people in the West are still in denial” (p. 212).
She hopes that reading Now They Call Me Infidel will shake some of us out of such denial!
* * * * * * * * * * Serge Trifkovic’s The Sword of the Prophet (Boston: Regina Orthodox Press, Inc., 2002) set forth an admittedly “politically incorrect” perspective on Islam, its “history, theology, and impact on the world,” and portrayed today’s Middle East conflicts as a recent manifestation of an ancient religious struggle. He basically reiterates the evaluation rendered by the great French thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, who’s analysis was unusually prescient: “‘I studied the Kuran a great deal. . . . I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world, and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion infinitely more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself’” (p. 208). Trifkovic began his book with the assertion that the 9/11 Muslim terrorists’ attack on the United States demonstrated an antipathy against the Christian world deeply rooted in Islam. That so many in the media refer to Islam as a “religion of peace” shows that “the problem of collective historical ignorance–or even deliberately induced amnesia–is the main difficulty in addressing the history of Islam in today’s English speaking world, where claims about far-away lands and cultures are made on the basis of domestic multiculturalism assumptions rather than on evidence” (p. 8). Just as left-leaning journalists and professors long avoided condemning the evils of Stalinist Russia, pro-Muslim “experts” have skillfully spread skillful propaganda to gloss over the truth concerning Islam. To set forth the facts—to counteract the propaganda—this book was written.
Importantly, we learn much about Muhammad. Born in Mecca in 570 A.D., he spent his early years working at menial jobs. Then, fortuitously, he met a wealthy widow, Khadija, for whom he worked and ultimately married. Freed from financial concerns, he spent time in the solitude and, in A.D. 610, received a message from an angel designating him as “the Messenger of God.” In A.D. 622, he and 70 followers moved to the more hospitable city of Medina. This event—the hijrah—marks Islam’s true beginning point. Importantly, Muhammad turned from religion to politics, relying less on persuasion than coercion. His followers raided camel caravans and enriched themselves and their prophet. Evaluating the prophet’s career, Trifkovic says: “Muhammad’s practice and constant encouragement of bloodshed are unique in the history of religions. Murder pillage, rape, and more murder are in the Kuran and the Traditions seem to have impressed his followers with a profound belief in the value of bloodshed as opening the gates of Paradise’ and prompted countless Muslim governors, caliphs, and viziers to refer to Muhammad’s example to justify their mass killings, looting, and destruction. ‘Kill, kill the unbelievers wherever you find them’ is an injunction both unambiguous and powerful” (p. 51). His example and teachings led quickly to what Trifkovic calls “jihad without end.” The century following Muhammad’s death witnessed the success of Muslim armies, conquering much of the known world, creating “an Arab empire ruled by a small elite of Muslim warriors who lived entirely on the spoils of war, the poll and land taxes paid by the subjugated peoples” (p. 89). Under Muslim rule, lush agricultural lands slowly withered away and became deserts. Thriving economies, subordinated to Muslim dictates, slowly sank into impoverishment. “The periods of civilization under Islam, however brief, were predicated on the readiness of the conquerors to borrow from earlier cultures, to compile, translate, learn, and absorb. Islam per se never encouraged science, meaning “disinterested inquiry,” because the only knowledge it accepts is religious knowledge” (p. 196).
Turning to the “fruits” of Islam, Trifkovic discusses such things as the absolute lack of religious liberty, the subjugation of women, the widespread practice of enslaving non-Muslims. He also shows how deeply embedded is the hatred for Jews in the Muslim world. For example, during WWII the Mufti of Jerusalem and former President of the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine, Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, urged Muslims to support Hitler. In a radio broadcast from Berlin, he said: “’Arabs! Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them‘” (p. 186). “Kill the Jews!” That’s chanted in Gaza and American universities. Still they hate! As do Hamas’ American supporters!