‘Allah Makes Us Do It’

If you aren’t beginning to feel bullied yet, you will.

Right now, Afghanistan is in the middle of a storm of anti-western violence that the Washington Post mistakenly refers to as “fratricide.” (“NATO personnel recalled from Afghan ministries in wake of deadly attack”). It might be accurate in a normal world to call it fratricide when an ally turns his weapon on a brother in arms.  But there’s no way in hell Afghanis see us, or any infidels, as brothers.

A rampager in Kabul was quoted Friday explaining why Islamic rage can only expand, not contract, even when the leader of the free world has groveled.

“We don't care about Obama's apology,” said Kamaluddin, a 25-year-old Kabul protester who uses only one name. “We have to protest to be responsible to our God. They are burning our Quran. An apology is not enough.” (“Gunman kills 2 US advisers in Afghan ministry”).

“We have to protest to be responsible to our God.” There’s the key thought. Muslims have to do this, otherwise Allah will hold them accountable. Now there’s a report out of Pennsylvania that a state judge dismissed an open-and-shut case against a Muslim defendant charge with assault and harassment:

The victim, Ernest Perce, wore a “Zombie Mohammed” costume and pretended to walk among the dead (in the company of an associate who was the “Zombie Pope” — and who, you’ll be shocked to learn, was not assaulted). The assailant, Talag Elbayomy, a Muslim immigrant, physically attacked Perce, attempted to pull his sign off, and, according to police, admitted what he had done right after the incident. The defense argued that Elbayomy believed it was a crime to insult the prophet Mohammed (it is, under sharia law), and that because he was in the company of his children, he had to act to end this provocation and set an example about defending Islam. (“The Sharia Court of Pennsylvania — the Transcript”).

The judge dismissed the case against the assailant, finding the defendant lacked any “intent to harass, annoy or alarm,” because he only intended “to have the offensive situation negated.”  Exactly.  (And when has that motivation ever led to an assault?)   The judge lambasted the victim, an atheist, for being ignorant about Islam, and told him “you’re way outside your bounds on First Amendment rights.”  The judge adopted the defense offered by the assailant’s attorney that in many Muslim countries “something like this is definitely against the law there. In their society, in fact, it could be punishable by death, and it frequently is, in their society.”

I’m putting to one side the judge’s abject unfitness to sit on an American bench because I’d like to focus instead on the assailant’s conviction that “because he was in the company of his children, he had to act to end this provocation and set an example about defending Islam.“

The case of Hamza Kashgari, the Saudi journalist who was repatriated to Saudi from Malaysia to face execution for tweeting an imaginary man-to-man conversation he had with Mohammed, is yet another illustration of this absolute requirement that every earthly insult of Islam requires at least one death, if not more. A senior Saudi cleric didn’t see how Kashgari’s apology possibly could change the conditions laid down by the Qu’ran: “’Repenting will not work…any man who insults God or our Prophet (PBUH) should be killed,’ he said.” (“Senior Saudi cleric says Twitter blasphemer should be killed even if he repents”).

If you haven’t noticed by now, defending Islam against insults – either by preventing them or avenging them – may be the single biggest motivating force among Muslims worldwide. Remove the imperative to defend Islam – or else -- and there would be no need to destroy Israel, or to have knocked down the World Trade Center, or to honor-kill one’s daughters, or to commit a suicide attack on a health clinic, or to stop off on your way home from the mosque to help slaughter Christians coming out of Mass – all targets routinely condemned by their Muslim attackers as constituting  intolerable offenses against Allah.

I’m not actually suggesting Islam could get rid of its absolute imperative to defend Islam, just trying an exercise to help imagine what the world would be like without it.  I don’t really believe Islam can be reformed that way.  The belligerent view is too essential to Islam, too much of a mirror of its founder’s intolerant character.

Every religion defends itself, of course, that’s not the problem. Right now Catholics in America are defending the Church against Obama’s tyrannical health-care mandates. Coptic Egypts in Christian are defending themselves against an Islamic drive for their extinction.   But no one is being murdered as part of that defense.

Perhaps the difference is that a billion Catholics around the world aren’t held personally responsible to avenge every insult against the Lord Himself, while a billion Muslims have been taught they’re “responsible to” Allah to defend his honor at the cost of their own lives, or someone else’s.

And it would be a good place to remember that the burning of the Qu’rans in Afghanistan was accidental. Yet still Allah demands blood. 

No wonder they hate us. We keep making Allah mad.

When one considers the amount of energy the Ummah devotes to making sure that every word or deed insulting to the Prophet is either stopped before it happens, or avenged to the uttermost, the advantages of a worldwide Sharia state immediately become obvious. If the entire world were run like Saudi Arabia, there would be so much less to avenge. 

And then . . . Peace?