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Writings and Publications by Joseph B. H. McMillan
Part 5 of "Free Speech, The War on Terror and Islam" by Joseph B.H. McMillan:
The Problem Identified; Debate or Debacle; Arabs, Islam and the Nazis; Islam and the Dark Ages; Civilization and Tolerance under Islam; Conservatives "calling it as it is"?; Free Speech and Debate; The Consequences; A Solution?; Footnotes
Civilization and Tolerance under Islam
After assembling the basis of his new religion, Mohammed presented himself to the Jews as an apostle of God. “They [the Jews of Arabia] had irritated him [Mohammed] by their refusal to recognise him as a prophet, by ridicule and argument, and of course their [the Jews'] economic supremacy … was a standing irritant.”(37a)
Anyone who has read the Koran will recognise many of the characters: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Joseph of the multi-coloured coat fame and his brothers; Moses; Jesus and his mother Mary. Mohammed had rewritten the Old and New Testaments and claimed he had done so under the specific authorship of God.
Having been spurned by the Jews, and then the Christians, Mohammed had ‘revealed’ to him new verses to be included in the Koran, what Guillaume refers to as “the [Koran's] scornful words” regarding the Jews (see below). Mohammed pronounced that “Two religions may not dwell together on the Arabian Peninsular.”(38) Under Mohammed and his successors, the Caliph’s Abu Bakr and Omar I, all the Jews in Northern Arabia were slaughtered. Some of the slaughter and expropriation of the Jews’ property is recorded in the Koran.(39)
The verses of racial and religious intolerance in the Koran, added after Mohammed’s rejection by the Jews and Christians as a prophet,(40) would, if made by any other group, religion or people against the Muslims, be severely condemned as inciting racial and religious hatred.
Here is but a small sample from the Koran:
The peoples having the strongest enmity to Muslims are the “Jews and Pagans.”(41)
“We said to them [the Jews – who transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath] ‘Be ye apes, Despised and rejected’.”(42)
“Miserable is the price For which they [the Jews] have sold Their souls, in that They deny (the revelation) Which God has sent down, in insolent envy that God Of His Grace should send it To any of His servants He pleases: Thus have they drawn On themselves Wrath upon Wrath. And humiliating is the punishment Of those who reject Faith.”(43)
“You will find them [the Jews], Of all people, most greedy Of Life, - even more than the idolaters.” (44)
“Taste ye [the Jews] the penalty of the Scorching Fire!” for saying “Truly, God is indignant and we are rich” and for “slaying the Prophets”(45)
“.. With a twist of their [the Jews’] tongues And a slander of Faith. If only they had said: ‘We hear and we obey’; And ‘Do hear’; And ‘Do look at us’: It would have been better For them, and more proper; But God hath cursed them [the Jews] For their Unbelief; and but a few Of them will believe.”(46)
There are many more such verses in the Koran hostile to the Jews. But there are also plenty that strike at the heart of Christianity. Here are just a few:
“[T]he Christians [went wrong] in raising Jesus the Apostle to equality with God”. The Koran goes on to deny the Crucifixion,(47) declare that Christ is not God and it is blasphemy to claim such (48), and likewise it is blasphemous to proclaim the Holy Trinity.(49) For good measure the Koran calls “God’s curse” on those who “Call Christ the Son of God”. (50)
And what does the Koran have to say about the “deluded” People of the Book? It says this: Fight those who do not “acknowledge the Religion Of Truth [ie Islam], (even if they are) of the People of the Book (ie Christians and Jews), Until they pay the Jizha [a kind of compensation] With willing submission, And feel themselves subdued.”(51)
Verses 20 and 38 of Surah (chapter) 9 exhort “those who believe” to fight with their goods “and their persons” in Gods [ie Islam’s] cause. Verse 38 admonishes those who hesitate to sacrifice their lives when “asked [by their spiritual leader] to go forth in the cause of God” because “little is the comfort of this life, as compared With the Hereafter.”
“Soon shall we cast terror Into the hearts of the Unbelievers, For that they joined companions With God, for which He had sent No authority: their abode Will be the fire: and evil Is the home of the wrongdoers!”(52)
There is little ambiguity in these verses, and little “tolerance” so far as I can detect.
At first blush, it would seem odd that Islam, which draws so heavily on the Old and New Testaments, would be so hostile to Jews and Christians. Not so when we remember that these verses were added to the Koran after Mohammed was rejected as a prophet by the Jews and Christians. And a further verse, added after Mohammed was rejected by the Jews, claims that the Jews “Heard the Word of God, And perverted it knowingly After they [the Jews] understood it.”(53) The Commentary to Surah 2 Verses 40 – 86 is more blunt. It claims that the Jews “falsified Scripture.”(54)
Today the popular myth is that Muslim, and especially Arab, hostility to the Jews relates to the establishment of Israel in 1948.
That is clearly nonsense. These virulently anti-Jewish and anti-Christian exhortations, together with the Charter of Omar (see above), ensured and incited persecution of the Jews, Christians and other “infidels” from the inception of Islamic rule, and continues to this day in varying degrees, especially in most Arab countries. The Jews fared worst by far.
These are just a few examples of the hundreds cited by Joan Peters in her book From Time Immemorial:
After the Arab conquest in the seventh century “The Jews of Yemen were subjected to the severest possible interpretation of the Charter of Omar…..For about four centuries, the Jews suffered under the fierce fanatical edict of the most intolerant of all Islamic sects.”(55)
In Yemen, in the eighteenth century, “Fanatical rulers ordered synagogues to be destroyed, and public prayers [by Jews] were forbidden.” (56)
After the Arab conquest of Egypt the “Jews were forced to wear miniature golden calf images around their necks.” If the Jews did not convert to Islam, “Next they wore bells, and after that six-pound wooden blocks were hung around their necks. In fury at his failure, the caliph had the Cairo Jewish Quarter destroyed, along with its Jewish residents, in 1012.” (57)
In Morocco Jews were, with great frequency, raped and looted, synagogues were burned, sacred Torah scrolls burned, and Jews murdered. (58)
In Tunisia in 1551 the “founder of the Saad Dynasty in Morocco incited the Muslims to anti-Jewish hostilities ……. By delivering inflammatory speeches against the Jews.” (59)
After the Arab conquest of Libya, the Jews were “sacked, cheated and pillaged.” And the “Twelfth century brought the barbarity of the Almohads to the eastern plains, and the Jews were severely persecuted “for the purpose of conversion” about 1140”. (60)
For anyone wanting to establish the facts and truth about so called Muslim tolerance, from the so-called Dark Ages to the present day, there are an abundance of objective sources. Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial brings many of these sources together exceptionally well.
Likewise, the myth of the great Islamic Civilization is well documented. The Arab conquests did not bring with them, or create, great cultures. It found them where they conquered, insisting in time that Arabic be the universal language in the Islamic world. Joan Peters refers to this Arab Islamic civilization myth:
“According to Hogarth, even the “extraordinarily short” Arab rule was mechanical and not innovative.” (61)
“The Omayyads alike in Syria and Spain seemed to have carried on with the machinery they found, insisting only after a time on expression in Arabic.” (62)
“The use of the adjective Arab to describe the various facets of this civilization has often been challenged on the grounds that the contribution to “Arab medicine,” “Arab philosophy,” etc of those who were of Arab descent was relatively small. Even the use of the word Muslim is criticized, since so many of the architects of this culture were Christians and Jews.” (63)
Now, few will deny that there were great developments in the sphere under Islamic rule. There is no evidence of which I am aware that these innovations were a result of Islamic inspiration. It is also pure deceit to declare, as Blair and others do, that the Muslim world was some “beacon of tolerance and civilization” to Europe in the Dark Ages.
Apart from the simple assertion of Islam’s tolerance and civilization, the only other ‘argument’ I have seen advanced in favour of prohibiting debate about Islam is the billion or more adherents to the Islamic creed. If this is what debate has come to in so-called free democratic countries, one can only despair. It is like invoking the number of smokers in the world to demonstrate the social and health benefits of smoking.
Click here to read Part 6 of this article, "Conservatives "calling it as it is?"
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