Wednesday,
10 February 2016
France to Shut Down 100 to 160
Mosques; War-grade Weapons Found in Some
Written
by Selwyn Duke
George W. Bush and others have often emphasized that Islam is a
“religion of peace.” Others view Islam as a "religion of the sword,"
and they include traditionalist-minded Muslims and mosques. This is evident
after the French government recently raided Muslim houses of worship in the
country and found “one third of the quantity of war-grade weapons that are
normally seized in a year,” as Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve put it.
The mosques implicated themselves “because they are run illegally
without proper licenses, they preach hatred, or use takfiri speech," Hassan
El Alaoui, one of France’s chief imams, told Al Jazeera on
Wednesday; “takfiri” speech is that which levels accusations of apostasy at
other Muslims. El Alaoui also reported that the government will
shut down between 100 and 160 mosques, approximately five percent of the
nation’s 2,600 total. In addition, authorities searched 2,235 Muslim businesses
and homes and arrested 232 individuals.
In the wake of the November 13 Paris jihadist attacks that killed 130
people, however, it was the hardware found that was especially alarming. Writes
Christine Niles at ChurchMilitant.com:
[S]everal
of these [100-plus] mosques have been raided, revealing a "staggering" number of weapons and ammunition. Sunday,
authorities conducted a raid on a mosque in Lagny-sur-Marne, 18 miles east of
Paris, and uncovered 334 weapons and a large quantity of 7.62mm Kalashnikov
ammunition, along with ISIS propaganda videos.
Police also turned up recordings of chants
"glorifying the martyrs of jihad linked to the terrorist organization
Jabhat al-Nusra," the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. The chants were found
among teaching materials for youth in a madrassa, or private religious school
for boys, connected to the mosque.
Although this story has not been widely reported,
it should further fuel debate about the nature of Islam and the effects of
wide-scale Muslim migration into the West. This has been a major topic
recently, with presidential contender Donald Trump suggesting that Muslim
immigration should be suspended until we can “figure out what's going on.”
And with the West being awash in relativism — and its correlative
religious-equivalence doctrine, stating that all religions are morally equal —
broaching this topic brings accusations of bigotry and “Islamophobia.” But
Truth doesn’t bend to political correctness, and there’s certainly something
“going on.” Consider, for instance, a German study released in 2010 and which involved 45,000 young people. It found that
while increasing religiosity among Christian youths made them less violent,
increasing religiosity among Muslim ones actually made them more violent.
And anecdotes to this effect abound. The Daily
Telegraph reports today about 18-year-old Australian convert to Islam Alo-Bridget
Namoa, who is allegedly now a supporter of Da’esh (ISIS), prays five times
daily to Allah, and has said referring to herself and her Muslim husband, “I
want to do an Islamic Bonnie and Clyde on the kaffir” (non-Muslim). The Daily Mail told the story yesterday of 33-year-old U.S. Army deserter
and Muslim convert Daniel Seth Franey of Montesano, Washington, “who called
Osama bin Laden 'a beautiful man,' made pro-Islamic State statements and called
for the death of American troops,” the paper related. Then there was convert
“John T. Booker Jr., 21, an American citizen also known as Mohammed Abdullah
Hassan, …who vowed to ‘bring the Islamic State straight to your doorstep’ [and]
pleaded guilty Wednesday to attempting to detonate a car bomb at Fort Riley
military base in Kansas,”wrote CNN Feb. 4. And just two days before that, the Associated Press reported that North Carolina convert Justin Nojan Sullivan, 19, had “killed
his neighbor and stole the man's money so he could buy an assault rifle to
carry out an Islamic State-inspired shooting at a concert or club”; Sullivan
believed he could murder 1,000 people in his attack. Critics have dubbed these
happenings “Sudden Jihad Syndrome,” and nary a week goes by — and maybe not
even a day — without an instance of one occurring.
But while this phenomenon can seem sudden, it’s not new. As Professor
Thomas F. Madden, chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University
in St. Louis, Missouri, wrote in his 2002 essay “The Real History of the Crusades”:
While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in
war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim
expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two
spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity — and for that
matter any other non-Muslim religion — has no abode. Christians and Jews can be
tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam,
Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered.
Some Muslims readily acknowledge this, too. Also just yesterday, we
learned of Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who was convicted by an Indonesian
court of conspiring with Da’esh and setting up a Jihadist training camp; writes the Deccan Chronicle of his
statements in his own defense, “‘I hope judges understand that my deed of
helping training camp in Aceh was my religious obligation,’ Bashir told the
court. ‘I’m guilty according to the government law, but what I did is correct
according to Islam.’” And then there’s what was reported just the day before.
Quoting The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Jihad Watch related,
“In a December 15 lecture about ISIS at the American University in Beirut,
Abdel Bari Atwan, former editor-in-chief of ‘Al-Quds Al-Arabi’ and the current
editor-in-chief of ‘Al-Rai Al-Youm’ rejected common claims that the savagery of
ISIS is alien to Islam, presenting examples of similar conduct from Islamic history. Atwan said
that the West faces two options: to contain ISIS or to destroy it.”
Of course, some may say the West has cultivated the worst of both
worlds: disrupting the Mideast with misguided military endeavors while not
containing Da’esh. And considering how Christendom is admitting countless thousands of impossible-to-vet Muslim migrants, these critics
may ask, “How does it make sense for the West to send soldiers to fight in the
Middle East if we’re going to bring the Middle East to the West?”
Unfortunately, what’s really “going on” isn’t hard to figure out: Awash in relativism,
multiculturalism, and diversity doctrine, a morally confused Occident is
facilitating “the soft Islamic conquest of the West,” as Muslim refugee Dr.
Mudar Zahran put it last
October. What Muslims “couldn’t do in the last 20 years,” he explained, “now
the West is doing for us for free — and even paying for it.”
And pay for it we will.
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