NYT: Trump’s Counterterror Chief Has ‘Falsely Argued That Violence Is a Fundamental Part of Islam’
It is astounding but true: nearly 25 years after the 9/11 jihad attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, the establishment media and the leftist political elites are still pretending that Islam is a religion of peace. If the repeated declarations of Islamic jihadis that they’re acting on commands of the Qur’an and imitating the example of Muhammad aren’t convincing, what will be?
Leftists (and many others who should know better) aren’t any more moved by those declarations than they are by the fact that the Qur’an and Sunnah contain numerous direct exhortations to violence, or by the fact that Islamic law in all its various forms across the sects of Islam contains detailed and elaborate instructions regarding what kind of violence is permitted, when it is permitted, and under what circumstances it is actually not allowed.
For some people, facts are inconveniences that simply must be moved out of the way whenever they interfere with what one wishes to believe, and so many people all across the political spectrum in the West today want so very much to believe that Islam is benign and to be welcomed that they have made themselves comfortably impervious to reality.
Among these fantasists are, of course, the people who write and edit the New York Times, which on Sunday ran a lengthy piece entitled “How Trump Took Up the ‘Christian Genocide’ Cause in Nigeria.” Note the quotation marks around “Christian Genocide”: the Paper of Record wants you to ignore the mountains of evidence of this genocide, and to believe that the whole idea is just a right-wing fantasy, part of “an intense, yearslong push led by Christian activists, Republican lawmakers and American celebrities seeking U.S. intervention in a long-simmering security crisis in Nigeria.”
The Times insists that while “thousands are killed annually in Nigeria,” believers in its favorite religion aren’t the only ones at fault, for “the victims include large numbers of both Christians and Muslims.” Oh, well, then! The Times explains that “the violence involves battles over land, kidnappings for ransom, sectarian tensions and terrorism, but the activists wanted Mr. Trump to see the conflict through a single lens: the persecution of Christians.” The Times, you see, wants you to think it is marvelously nuanced in its perspective, able to see the conflict in all its various dimensions, while these benighted patriotic activists were distressingly monochromatic.
In reality, the Times, like all establishment media outlets, always works to exonerate or at least distance Islam from the crimes done in its name and in accord with its teachings, and so it simply cannot see an Islamic genocide of Christians in Nigeria.
Instead, it saw the machinations of dastardly patriotic activists: “Back in Washington, anti-persecution groups secured the meeting with Trump officials near the White House just as Republicans were gathering for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Sitting at the grand wooden table, they outlined their concerns to Sebastian Gorka, the National Security Council’s senior director for counterterrorism, who has falsely argued that violence is a fundamental part of Islam.”
Falsely? The Times link goes to a 2017 article, also from the New York Times, that stated that Gorka “has said violence is a fundamental part of Islam and emanates from the language of the Quran. He rejects scholars’ assessment that Islamic militancy is an outgrowth of poverty, poor governance and war.”
Oh, scholars say it, so it must be true! Unfortunately for the New York Times, however, there are plenty of scholars of Islam, believing Muslims themselves, who say otherwise. The Saudi Islamic scholar Muhammad al-Arefe has said: “Devotion to jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer.”
Related: New York Times Doesn’t Bother Telling You This Key Detail About Its Favorite Gaza Doctor
The founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, once said: “Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all!... Islam says: Kill them [the non-Muslims], put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]…. Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who may want to kill you!... Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword!... There are hundreds of other [Qur’anic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”
I could multiply such examples endlessly. Not only do innumerable Islamic scholars and Muslim leaders insist that violence is fundamental to Islam, but 1,400 years of Islamic history show that Muslims are aware of that fact and have consistently acted upon it. The Qur’an is filled with exhortations, including “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, 4:91, cf. 9:5).
So who are we going to believe? Islam’s foundational texts, its history, and its scholars, or the non-Muslim leftists at the New York Times who are determined that you not think ill of Islam? The truth is obvious for anyone who has the courage to face it.
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