Can I ever forget, twenty five years ago, early evening here in Hong Kong, when we heard that an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center? The North Tower. And then a second plane. Which we saw live, in real time, before even the CNN reporter who was face-to-camera, back to the burning North Tower. At which I turned to my wife and said “it’s got to be Al-Qaeda”.
Can we forget?
Can I ever forget the next day, president Bush standing on the smoking rubble, declaring “we’ll get them”? But also declaring “Islam is a religion of peace”.
At which I thought “huh?”. How does that square with what we’ve just seen? How can it be a “religion of peace” when we already knew, to a moral certainty, that men driven by this very religion had done it? Had hijacked and flown planes into two towers full of innocent people?
Which started me on my quest to learn about this “religion of peace”. On my first reading of the Quran. Of the Hadith. Of the Sirah of Muhammad. Of the Umdat Al-Salik, the Classic Manual of Islamic Jurisprudence. And my library, now in the several hundreds, of books on Islam from the apologetics to the critical.
I concluded early on that “Islam is Islam”. Its most pious votaries say so. Its religious leaders say so. Its political leaders say so. All knowledgeable observers say so.
At the same time I recognised the tactical reason for saying there’s “Islam” and there’s “Islamism”. Tackling the massive thing that is worldwide Islam is too tough. Tackling a subset is more doable.
We’ve now reached a point in the west where the dangers of Islam to our societies, to our freedoms and tolerance are so apparent that we have to face the real truth. The uncomfortable truth. That the problem is Islam itself. The problem is its doctrines. Its values. That it’s an ideology more than it is a religion. That that ideology is incompatible with western enlightenment values.
Amy Mek’s discussion on the eve of our quarter-century anniversary of the horrors at The Twin Towers:
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the least we owe the dead is an honest conversation about Islam.
There is no moderate Islam. There is no Islamism. There is Islam. Islamic leaders have said it. Only the West invented softer words to protect the doctrine from scrutiny.
A well-funded machine of think tanks, media, and lobby groups has spent decades selling the lie of a “good” moderate version.
MOST of the people selling it are not even Muslim. They want you to believe the political and military commands in the Quran, Hadith, and 1,400 years of law can be edited out.
They cannot. Rewriting the text is apostasy. In Islamic law, apostates are marked for death.
“Islamism” was invented to split the religion from what it commands. That lie became policy. Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) kept law enforcement in the dark, purged doctrine from training, and left known Muslim attackers on the radar who could not be described accurately. Lobby groups bought political leaders.
Then the same Islamic organizations were welcomed in to teach the society they mean to dominate a harmless story about their own "faith".
Islam has no detachable political track. Euphemisms protect careers. They do not protect the West.
Islam is just Islam. Amy Mek
Read RAIR’s “Islam is Just Islam.”
Read the foundational texts of Islam.
The Trinity of Islam: the Quran, the Hadith, the Sirah.
Add on: the Umdat Al-Salik, the Manual of Islamic Jurisprudence (aka Sharia), and you have the corpus of Islam. That’s your Islam.
