RUTHFULLY YOURS

Wednesday morning I received an official letter from the British Home Office, notifying me that I would not be allowed to enter the country on the grounds that “your presence here is not conducive to the public good.” My colleague Pamela Geller received a similar letter. We had planned to lay a wreath at a memorial to British soldier Lee Rigby, who was beheaded by Islamic jihadists on a Woolwich street on May 22. But it is not conducive to the public good in Britain to oppose jihad violence and Islamic supremacism.

For that is why the ban came down. The Home Office’s letter to me said:

You are reported to have stated the following:

[Islam] is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society because media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.

I said no such thing, of course. I generally speak and write in coherent English. But the point is clear enough. I certainly have pointed out that Islam mandates warfare against unbelievers. This is not really a controversial point to anyone who has studied Islam at all. One man who has done so has said that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

What venomous Islamophobe said that? Omar Ahmad, cofounder of the “civil rights” organization known as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Another notorious hatemonger explained that “the Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world….The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state.” That Islamophobe was Majid Khadduri, an Iraqi scholar of Islamic law of international renown.

Yet another anti-Muslim bigot was Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.

A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law endorsed by the most prestigious institution in Sunni Islam, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, says that the leader of the Muslims “makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax,” and cites Qur’an 9:29 in support of this idea: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and who forbid not what Allah and His messenger have forbidden-who do not practice the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book-until they pay the poll tax out of hand and are humbled.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o9.8)

Oh, the Islamophobia! How did it penetrate even to the hallowed halls of al-Azhar? How did all these Islamic scholars get the hateful idea that Islam teaches warfare and subjugation, which the British Home Secretary knows is an idea not conducive to the public good?

Ultimately, it’s unclear how all these (and many other) venerable authorities on Islam came to misunderstand it in such an Islamophobic way, but in any case, it is a good thing Home Secretary Theresa May is keeping all this Islamophobia and hatred out of Britain. Britons will not be subjected to hateful misrepresentations of Islam like this spectacularly noxious bit of Islamophobia:

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. Allah said that if a man fights the infidels, the infidels will be unable to prepare to fight.

You may be wondering if it was I or Pamela Geller who penned that hate-filled misrepresentation of the beautiful Islamic doctrine of jihad. But in fact, it was neither one of us. It was Mohammed al-Arefe, a Saudi Muslim cleric who believes that shedding Infidel blood and smashing Infidel skulls is pleasing to his god.

Apparently believing that such violence is an Islamic imperative is just fine with the British Home Office as long as one does so approvingly: Mohammed al-Arefe was just last week admitted into Britain without any difficulty. If one believes that such violence is an Islamic imperative but opposes it, however, watch out: that is not conducive to the public good.

Thus Britain has not actually banned the truth about Islam. You can get into Britain if you believe that Islam mandates warfare against unbelievers. You just have to think warfare against unbelievers is a fine thing to pursue.

And thus the foremost lesson arising from the banning of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer is this: the unbelievers in Britain don’t stand a chance.

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