After putting a hand to your mouth to conceal a smirk and stifle a guffaw, you’d say, “Oh, c’mon, Baron! Don’t be ridiculous — we all know you’re straight. You have a wife and a child. Besides, you’re infamous in certain circles as a man with an eye for a well-turned ankle.”
“What are you talking about? I simply mean that I’m feeling light-hearted and happy-go-lucky.”“That’s not what ‘gay’ means.”
“Sure it does. Here, look at the dictionary: ‘1. Excited with merriment, manifesting sportiveness or delight… 2. Bright and lively in appearance…’”
“That’s the 1921 edition of Webster’s Unabridged!”
“So what? If it was good enough for my granddaddy, it’s good enough for me.”
“But the meaning of the word ‘gay’ has changed.”
“Really? What does it mean now?”
“‘Homosexual’.”
“Egad!”
“Baron, you need to get out more.”
I concocted the above fantasy so that I can talk about jihad.
Recently a Muslim commenter here at Gates of Vienna left us a treatise on jihad. Here’s an excerpt from it:
Do you even know what Jihad means? Contrary to popular belief, its not a holy war to destroy other religions and to make Islam predominant. That kind of act is forbidden in Islam.
A Jihad is any Islamic act that is performed under dire circumstances.
This exegesis on Islam is the standard CAIR party line. Another version of the same thing was recently put forward by the Jew-hating jihad preacher of VisionTV, Dr. Israr Ahmad:
Jihad i.e. the struggle to establish the just politico-socio-economic order ordained by the Creator of all humanity and given to mankind through his last Messenger Muhammad so as to bring peace and harmony in the world, should not be considered a bad thing.
This was after Dr. Ahmad had gotten himself in trouble with the Canadian TV network. But back before the kuffar were paying attention, this is what he had to say about jihad:
In the hour-long talk, Israr Ahmad said, “Jihad in the way of Allah, for the cause of Allah, can be pursued either with your financial resources or your bodily strength when you go to fight the enemy in the battlefield.
“So jihad, the highest form, is fighting in the cause of Allah.”
Young Muslims in Canada draw their inspiration from Hassan al-Banna, the founder of Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, more commonly known as the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna didn’t mince words in this meditation on jihad:
- - - - - - - - - -
Islam is concerned with the question of jihad and the drafting and the mobilisation of the entire Umma into one body to defend the right cause with all its strength than any other ancient or modern system of living, whether religious or civil. The verses of the Qur’an and the Sunnah of Muhammad (PBUH) are overflowing with all these noble ideals and they summon people in general (with the most eloquent expression and the clearest exposition) to jihad, to warfare, to the armed forces, and all means of land and sea fighting.
To back up his assertions, he includes pages and pages of quotations from the Koran, the Hadith, and respected Islamic scholars. Then he has this to say:
Islam allows jihad and permits war until the following Qur’anic verse is fulfilled:
‘We will we show them Our signs in the universe, and in their own selves, until it becomes manifest to them that this (the Qur’an) is the truth.’ (Surat al-Fussilat (41), ayah 53)
[…]
My brothers! The ummah that knows how to die a noble and honourable death is granted an exalted life in this world and eternal felicity in the next. Degradation and dishonour are the results of the love of this world and the fear of death. Therefore prepare for jihad and be the lovers of death. Life itself shall come searching after you.
My brother, you should know that one day you will face death and this ominous event can only occur once. If you suffer on this occasion in the way of Allah, it will be to your benefit in this world and your reward in the next.
It’s evident that at least some Muslims believe that the word “jihad” means “holy war”. So whose dictionary are we going to use?
I cite Hassan al-Banna on this topic because the Muslim Brotherhood is one of the most influential propagators of Islam today. The writings of al-Banna and his successor Sayyid Qutb inspire devout Muslims all over the world. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are both proselytizers for the Ikhwan and its literature.
The Muslim Brotherhood is now ascendant, having been granted recognition by the West through its surrogates in Hamas and its apologists here in the USA in organizations such as CAIR. By legitimizing these groups, the White House has done much of the legwork for theIkhwan.Yet CAIR, the White House, the media, and all the other apologists for jihad are the first to tell us that Islam is peaceful, that jihad means “an inner struggle”, that a great religion has been hijacked by a handful of fanatics, yadda yadda yadda.
Coming from CAIR, this is taqiyya, or lying in the service of Allah.
But what is it when President Bush or Condoleezza Rice says it? Is it stupidity, or sedition, or ignorance, or some combination of these three?
Or is it some kind of sly misdirection required by the inscrutabilities of statecraft?
What do they really think jihad means?
Refutation by Redefinition
The disingenuous insistence by Islam and its apologists that “jihad does not mean holy war” is an example of what I call “refutation by redefinition”. An opponent is told, in effect, that his premise is wrong, that the named phenomenon does not exist, and that he is mistaken to describe the practice in such terms. In effect, the issue of violence in the name of Allah is redefined out of existence.
Thus, anyone who commits violence is not a “true Muslim” and is not practicing “true jihad”. The word does not mean these things, and people who act this way are not really part of the Ummah, so we may disregard them. For the purposes of argument, and airport security, and legislation, violent jihad does not exist.
The obfuscators for Islam are following a three-pronged strategy:
| 1. | “Jihad” does not mean “holy war”. | |
| 2. | Those who say it does are not really Muslims and have nothing to do with Islam. | |
| 3. | You, a mere kafir, are not qualified to judge these things. You are ignorant of the faith, and therefore your opinions constitute Islamophobia and may safely be ignored. |
Helped along by a compliant media, this is a very effective strategy for Islam’s propagandists. In terms of the public discussion, jihad as an act of violence simply ceases to exist.
We must cut the Gordian knot concerning jihad, and refuse to consider any theoretical definitions of it.
Instead, let’s return to a Biblical simplicity: By their fruits ye shall know them.
It’s an irrefutable fact that thousands upon thousands of people are killed every year in the name of jihad. The people who do the killing consider their acts to be jihad. The “charities” that fund the slaughter believe they are following the dictates of the Koran and lending financial support to jihad. And millions — maybe more than a billion — of the Muslim faithful look on these actions with at least tacit approval, and consider them jihad.
If huge numbers of believers consider the wanton slaughter of innocents to be jihad, it doesn’t really matter how academics, diplomats, and editorial writers define the word. Usage is everything.
Was the language made for the dictionary, or the dictionary for the language?
Once enough people have established usage, the definition in the dictionary changes.
Whatever the former definition of “jihad” was, usage requires that it be thrown out and replaced with what Arabic speakers mean by the word: “Indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of unbelievers, with the aim of extending Islam.”
Noah Webster could only approve.
7 comments:
Since Islamnist 'peace & justice'
style redefinitions of jihad in accordance with cultural Marxist dialectic are simply taqiyya, the interesting question is:
"But what is it when President Bush or Condoleezza Rice says it? Is it stupidity, or sedition, or ignorance, or some combination of these three?
Or is it some kind of sly misdirection required by the inscrutabilities of statecraft?
What do they really think jihad means?"
1. I think the typical secular-liberal-nihilist view is that jihad can mean whatever you want it to mean - if we all agree it means 'peaceful inner struggle', then that's what it means.
2. I think Bush takes as a primary axiom that all religions are good, and combines that with the desire of all people for freedom. Since all religions are good, jihad can't mean anything bad, ergo...
3. I think for nihilist-realists like (I think) Cheney, they know fine well what it means, but don't care, since their goals are entirely short term acquisition of wealth and power, and a polite fiction can be useful.
I'm not sure which of these fits Condi Rice - I suspect that talking to Bush she professes #2, talking to Cheney #3, but that her own view is probably closer to #1, with a bit of #3. She's not an intellectually curious person and I doubt it keeps her awake at night. I don't get the impression that anyone in the US leadership actually takes Islam and Islamism seriously as a threat, so they either think they have the luxury of deceiving the public, or in Bush's case actually believe the rhetoric about a small group of 'extremists'.
It's important to understand that jihad, like all other fundamental muslim beliefs, mirrors the life of mohamed in its forms.
The result is that when westerners are told that sometimes jihad is a 'personal struggle', they assume its just another form of takkiyeh (aka: bald-faced lies to promote islam), when in fact, the personal struggle jihad was just as big a part of the concept of jihad as the military side.
If you follow the life of mohamed, you will see that he did in fact commit a personal struggle jihad which he called the jihad al-leesan before he moved onto violent military jihad. mohamed committed jihad in 2 phases, commonly known as the Meccan and Medinan phases. The first phase (Meccan), lasted 13 years and was simply a 'call to islam' jihad where he preached that it was a personal struggle to find and understand islam and to grow its strength. This is the form of jihad that muslims conveniently cite when they try to tell you that jihad isn't violent.
The second phase, aka the Medinan, lasted 10 years. This is the violent military jihad which is also the end phase of jihad. Military jihad is not to be waged until the muslim population is superior in power.
The reason so few westerners understand this nuance is because it is almost never explained in english and so few of us speak or read arabic.
However, there is one resource available by Abu Usamah which clearly lays it out. And, with a little reading between the lines, it is even more sinister. After the UK's channel4 investigation caught the islamic preachers speaking for jihad red-handed, the MPACUK gave a 30 minute rebuttal on google video. In it, abu gave a rare explanation into jihad which is amazingly explicit.
Google video is nice enough to host this islamist trash, feel free to listen to it yourself (it starts at about 20 minutes in):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5621979422472502457
For those who would rather read it, here is the transcribed text. Please note that what he is actually saying is that the only reason they don't call for an outright military jihad in England is simply because they aren't prepared yet:
EXPLANATION OF THE PHASES OF JIHAD
Abu Usamah
"But what jihad? What jihad are we going to make do in this time as muslims in terms of a military campaign? And I believe that the people who are screaming "jihad jihad" from the muslims meaning the military campaign, those people are actually cowards because of the reality of our situation. The reality, the weakness of the muslim ummah right now clearly shows us that those people have lost the plot. And the ayat was revealed in the koran. Make the big jihad with it. With 'it' means with the koran. With the koran. While he was in mecca, and his condition was the condition of weakness, his jihad was the jihad of spreading al islam and being patient. It wasn't the jihad of the sword even though the ayat revealed that, this ayat was revealed in mecca. He is the one, allah, who sent his messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth to declare it over all other religions, even though the disbelievers may detest it. All surah was reading that surra in mecca. And yet he didn't have a military campaign for 13 years. The jihad he had in mecca, was the jihad of leesan, calling the people to the religion. So an imam al-islam, another point that I have re-emphazised over and over again. This imam of al islam, he told the muslims. There is some wisdom in being in mecca for 13 years and then in medina for 10 years. There's some wisdom in that. So the muslims whenever they find themselves at any time or any place, when their conditions resembles the condition of all surra in mecca, then they should take on board and embrace the methodology of the meccan period. And when they find their situation resembles his life in medina, then they should take on board and embrace what he did and the methods of the medina period. A person who is in the meccan period right now, but he is going to deal with the situation as if he is in the medina period is only going to bring fithnan. And so we are in the meccan period right now, it's the period of weakness. So therefore we have to make the jihad of leesan, or The period of weakness."
A lesson can be derived from Communism. Remember when the Communists declared over and over that they were for "peace". Even as they were killing millions?
Well, they were for peace. By their definition. Karl Marx defined peace as "the absence of opposition to socialism". So by the definition they were using, they really were for peace.
And today, similarly, the radical Muslim is also for peace -- which he similarly defines as the state where all submit to the will of Allah. So, in his mind, he is slaughtering for the cause of peace.
Brings a new viewpoint to what is really meant when a Muslim greets you with "Peace be upon you", doesn't it?
Thus, anyone who commits violence is not a “true Muslim” and is not practicing “true jihad”.
Yet the Islamists consider any fellow Muslim who does not commit violence or condone terrorist acts against the kuffar guilty of takfir and therefore not practising "true jihad" , according to their perspective. Thus, one can see that both groups deny each other's existence and their allegiance to the "true" faith and its doctrines, thereby allowing them a fair amount of obfuscation and absolution of responsibility on their part.
Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri both were convinced of the warped concept of takfir and sought to justify the killing of fellow co-religionists simply by labelling them as something other than "true Muslims" - the practice of "refutation by redefinition", as you spoke of.
You know the Pillars of the Progressive: Muslims can insult other religions and their gods in cartoons, run anti-Semitic articles and basically spew venomous invective calling for the heads of their enemies - but when that type of behaviour is done unto them, it's 'racism', 'xenophobia' and 'anti-Islam'; cultural relativism which rationalises and legitimises suicide bombings, stoning and honour killings as 'natural', but condemns the incarceration of blood-thirsty terrorists as 'barbaric'; the Fairness Doctrine according fundamentalist and ideologically-charged commentaries that rant about 'Western imperialism' and 'oppression of Islam' equal value with rational analysis, while dismissing the need to respond to contradictions in their tirades by accusing critics of 'anti-Muslim bigotry' and the 'Western impulse to cow the inferior peoples'.
Without a CAIR
Islam is a secret society.
One definition of "jihad" for the insiders.
One for the gullible infidel dogs.
Meanwhile, back in reality, where Islamic carbombs are exploding and mass-murdering daily, anyone awake knows that Jihad means:
"kill all those who will not submit to our theocratic tyranny until the all world is Muslim?"
MSM must then mean:
Mainly Sleepwalking Media.
I recommend people listen very carefully to what the good padre says here.
Namely, "The mainstream media likes to paint a picture that Islam is peaceful and that it is just extremists who hold this point of view," he continued. "But that simply is not true. While I was working on my Doctoral Dissertation, I spent a year in Egypt and other Muslim countries. During that time I got to see first-hand what the Muslim children were learning. And it was pretty enlightening! Parents would teach their children songs about killing the infidel -- songs about death and destruction. Cars, with loud speakers attached, would drive through the streets repeating the message, 'Let their women be raped, their men be killed, and their children enslaved...'
"To be able to accurately judge a religion, we have to pay attention most importantly to what it teaches its children, not to what it says to the outside world."
Read The Legacy Of The Jihad, a collection of works by Islamic scholars.
If you still hold the view that either Islam is a religion of peace or jihad involves anything other than violent conflict then you're beyond reason.
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