General Mattis Has Imbibed Islamic Apologetics—Not Islam by Andrew Bostom
http://www.andrewbostom.org/2016/11/general-mattis-has-imbibed-islamic-apologetics-not-islam/
Yesterday (11/29/16), in an essay published at Pajamas Media, I urged POETUS Trump not to name either Generals Petraeus or Mattis to his cabinet, based upon the proven failure of the see-no-real-Islam COIN doctrine these men concocted, and implemented in Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Today (11/30/16), M.G. Oprea, writing at The Federalist, gushes, in her headline, that General James Mattis, who remains under serious consideration for Secretary of Defense by POETUS Trump, “Could Bust Our Deathly Political Correctness About Islam.” Ms. Oprea then proceeds to make a factually-challenged distinction between the Islam of her title, and “Islamism,” deeming the latter “political Islam,” a basic error given the designed, intractably political nature of Islam, and its quintessence, the Sharia. Notwithstanding this erroneous conception, she continues apace linking to a brief extract from a Heritage Foundation speech General Mattis gave last year (2015) which also alludes to “political Islam,” and “whether it is in America’s best interest.”
Mattis elaborated on these remarks during a March 2015 extended interview with Peter Robinson, which included the same “political Islam” comment, prefaced by the General’s more revealing observations on the alleged “root” of Islam’s—not Islamism’s—“problem.”
The problem with Islam goes back to the days of “The Prophet” [note: Mattis’s reverent usage]…when he dies and it splits into two halves and at that point they’ve got an internal war…that’s kept waxing and waning over the years…between the Sunni and the Shia…obviously it’s in a waxing phase
Thus Mattis’s formulation of Islam’s central “problem” ignores nearly 14 centuries of brutal, often genocidal jihad war—initiated by Muhammad, Islam’s prototype jihadist—against non-Muslims, ongoing to this day, which included decimation of Iraq’s residual Assyrian Christian population, during the General’s own tenure. Mattis essentially regurgitates the Muslim apologetic narrative which rivets on the alleged “breach of Islam’s political innocence”—the internecine struggle which punctuated Muhammad’s succession, including the assassinations of three of the four “Rightly Guided” Caliphs who followed Muhammad, and the ensuing violent Sunni-Shiite sectarian carnage after Caliph Ali’s killing, which persists to this day.
But while reiterating this pious Muslim narrative, Mattis is oblivious to its core Islamic Jew-hating theology: the story of Abd Allah b. Saba, an alleged renegade Yemenite Jew. Per Sunnis, Abd Allah b. Saba was indeed the founder of the heterodox Shi’ite sect. Sunnis held him responsible—identified as a black (i.e., a racist motif, as well!) Jew—for promoting the Shi’ite heresy and fomenting the rebellion and internal strife associated with this primary breach in Islam’s “political innocence”, culminating in the assassination of the third Rightly Guided Caliph Uthman, and the bitter, lasting legacy of Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian strife. Authoritative Shiite authors claimed this identifiably black Jew was guilty of perverting and warping the message of Caliph Ali’s true (Shiite) followers. Mainstream Shiites thus designated Abdullah Ibn Saba an avatar of extreme, heretical beliefs, for which Caliph Ali purportedly had Ibn Saba burned alive, as described in Shiite hadith. Supplementary Shiite hadith, and authoritative Koranic commentaries update this narrative and insist Jewish conspiracies were to blame for Ali’s death, and the death of his iconic “martyr” son, Hussein.
Informed, gimlet-eyed assessment of General Mattis’s 2015 pronouncements reveal that he has only imbibed Islamic apologetics, not unbowdlerized, real world Islam. As such, Mattis will only perpetuate the prevailing distorted cultural relativism which marks discussion of Islam by our policymaking elites.
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