Friday, January 21, 2011

“Allah Is Dead: Why Islam is Not a Religion”

During the course of our journey as the keepers of this blog, our understanding of the great foe to Western culture has grown and changed over time. As we have struggled to come to grips with the alien nature of Islam, many of our hopes have been laid aside. Some have been brutally hacked away. For example, the myth of the moderate Muslim was a hard notion to let go. When it left, the idea that Islam could be ‘reformed’ (in the sense that Judaism and Christianity have experienced) followed soon after.

Sure, there are secular Muslims, but when push comes to shove it is not they who are in charge of Islam. And their cloak of moderation can be deadly for themselves in the face of their masters. Look at any country ruled by Islam and you will see corruption and bloodshed. It is not only the borders of those countries that are bloody: the citizens within do not live, cannot live, in a manner commensurate with what Westerners believe to be basic human liberties.

With Islam, the Law prevails, and the Law is not merciful. Nor is it just. We all know the insane instances of applied sharia law in which raped women are beaten by the authorities for their “sins”.

This law can be twisted into pretzels that would make the Jesuits blush. From The Washington Times comes a news item that won’t surprise anyone who has studied the issue for long:

The latest edition of al Qaeda’s online, English-language magazine includes an article offering an Islamic justification for extremists to steal from non-Muslims to finance their activities…

Yes, even that paper calls them “extremists”. Through sad experience, that’s not a word we believe any more. It’s the terrorists, stupid. Stealing in the name of Allah’s Ummah is cool, according to these terrorists - and to the many, many “moderate” Muslims who contribute to the cause.

Allah is Dead by Rebecca Bynum Now comes a book that exactly lines up with the way our thinking has evolved at Gates of Vienna. Rebecca Bynum nails it in Allah Is Dead: Why Islam is Not a Religion. I’ve been saying this for a while now so it’s exciting to see that someone has written a book laying out systematically what it took us so many years to understand, to wit: Islam is a totalitarian system tricked out to look like a religion, and it fools even many of its adherents. In reality, Islam is a prison - as those who try to leave know all too well. You wonder sometimes what would happen if Islam’s so-called ‘apostasy’ were done away with? How many adherents would still be in the system? Especially I wonder how many women would remain if they were free (as in really free from physical retaliation) to get on the bus, Gus.

Allah is Dead is due for release in February, but it can be ordered now from Amazon. That page has a pre-review from Ms. Bynum’s cohort at The New English Review, Hugh Fitzgerald:
For many, the word religion commands immediate respect. In the American context, that word implicates the most important Constitutional protections. But is the ideology of Islam accurately, or helpfully, defined as a religion? Is that word, as understood in the Western world, properly applied to Islam, or does it help to hide a reality that needs to be understood? These are the questions that Rebecca Bynum asks, and to which she offers answers, in this, the first book-length investigation of how to most accurately describe or define Islam. [my emphasis]

Finally, someone has done it! By ‘it’, I mean given us a working definition of this utopian scheme that lays aside any theological pretensions in order to examine the ugly reality. All Utopias are misconceived, but none has been so brutal as this one.

Now, as all of us in the Counterjihad labored to come to terms with what our enemy means, we have been supplied serendipitously with a most necessary definition of what it is we fight. Interestingly, Ms. Bynum has arrived at the very point we were struggling to achieve. From all indications regarding her book, she has given us the perspective we need to more effectively do battle against this latest Destroyer.

I look forward to reading her book, to having the satisfaction of feeling, “yes, that’s it. She’s nailing it”. As the editorial description at Amazon puts it:

…Bynum maintains Islam s current status as a religion, along with all the other religions of the world, is in error. She refers to Islam as the duck-billed platypus of belief systems and proposes it should be classified accordingly; as the hybrid religio-socio-political belief system it is. She also reminds the Western world about what religion itself actually is, not the caricature modern analysts often mean when they refer to “religious fundamentalisms.” Bynum has given policy-makers a powerful tool for dealing with Islam. Let us hope they understand, and grasp, and choose to make use of it.

Soon after the book arrives, expect to see a post about it. In fact, if you order and read the book and want to write your own review, please send it to us for consideration as a post.

We fight more effectively when we can name the enemy. Thus, we can say with fair certainty, given the evidence, that Islam is a political system of brigandry with a veneer of pious-sounding rules. Do a little digging past that ‘piety’ about killing all the Jews and find the blood-soaked history behind the façade.

No wonder Islam annihilates any history but the one it writes.

No wonder it issues death threats against anyone who says otherwise.

No wonder so many people have died because of this plague on humanity.

Thank you, Ms. Bynum.

18 comments:

Jedilson Bonfim said...

I've already pre-ordered my copy, which will be sent to the undisclosed location where I'm living, but from which I'm going to move soon, on the Planet of the Arabs...

gsw said...

Please let your European readers know when (if) this book becomes available in Europe.
Perhaps Ms. Bynum can inform us whether there are any plans for publication here?

Believe me, we need it more than America does!

B.B. said...

Islam is a totalitarian system tricked out to look like a religion, and it fools even many of its adherents. In reality, Islam is a prison - as those who try to leave know all too well.

Why should a totalitarian political system and religion be mutually exclusive concepts? As far as I see it, a religion is a belief system that encompasses both normative morality and supernaturalism. Islam meets both criteria, so it seems like a religion to me.

What motivates this notion that Islam is not a religion? Is it that the word religion has a positive connotation to some, so they wish to separate anything they dislike from it? That would explain this talk about Islam being a "prison" somehow contradicting the notion that it is a religion.

I also suspect that this is a "freedom of religion" issue. If Islam is not a religion, it doesn't have the same protections from the state as does Christianity in any place that guarantees religious freedom. If Islam is not a religion, it wouldn't be unconstitutional for a the government to do things like ban the construction of mosques.

She refers to Islam as the duck-billed platypus of belief systems and proposes it should be classified accordingly; as the hybrid religio-socio-political belief system it is.

So she is already contradicting herself? Islam is religion+social+political. So, I guess she thinks that what differentiates Islam from the rest is that it is not only religion, but that it is a social and political system. But what religions haven't also claimed to also be all-encompassing social and political systems? There have been plenty of Christians who have claimed that the appropriate role of the state and how we construct society has been delineated in the bible. The Hindus will likely say the same about their ancient religious texts.

B.B.

Anonymous said...

I sincerely hope that Ms. Bynum is using a pseudonym because I feel a fatwa coming on....

Jedilson Bonfim said...

Egghead, she isn't using a pseudonym.

Hesperado said...

I tend to agree with the commenter of multiple exes above.

1) "religion" is not necessarily a good thing; so why do we feel the need to deny to Islam that rubric?

2) a thing can be X and also Y -- i.e., Islam can be a religion and also an evil dangerous totalitarian supremacist expansionist organization. See? Was that so hard?

3) The West has been regarding Islam as a religion for approximately 1400 years. It is hard-wired into the Western cultural consciousness. We have enough difficulties waking up our fellow sleepwalkers on this issue, without having to try to tell them to do yet another unfamiliar dance-step.

4) I prefer the tack of trying to get across the message that Islam is a totalitarian culture which includes religion. Islam is a religion: it has all the claptrap of religion under any definition one wants to use: it has a divine being, it has a holy text, it has religious rituals, it has all the mythologoumena of Judaism and Christianity (and Zoroastrianism) -- to wit: a Last Days, a Last Judgement, a Heaven, a Hell, angels, demons -- the works. It's absurd to try to "re-religionize" Islam.

Hesperado said...

Correction to my last post, last phrase:

"it's absurd to try to DE-religionize Islam"

is what I meant to say.

Nick said...

Anyone with an Amazon account in the UK should be able to buy a book from Amazon dot com in America. I've had loads of stuff sent over from the States.

Just watch out for the possible customs charge at this end. If it costs a bit, then you could be hit for a few more quid at the post office before they'll hand it over.

Blogger said...

>I wonder how many women would remain if they were free (as in really free from physical retaliation) to get on the bus, Gus.

Sadly it is the women who are often the most backward and worst encouragers of Islamic thinking. And I say that as a woman, an ex muslim convert, and having lived in Islamic society for 8 years. I always found the men far more open to thinking outside the box. I know this is just anecdotal, but you might have read about the 50 year old Saudi man who married a 13 year old girl. It was an arranged marriage encouraged by his mother, and while he said his male friends told him not to touch her for at least a year, his mother ordered him to consummate the marriage straight away.

Anonymous said...

A 50 year old Saudi man gets ordered by his mother to ... if only these people had some insight, imagine the contributions they could make to psychology (or humor).

doxRaven said...

I disagree with X^13

Why should a totalitarian political system and religion be mutually exclusive concepts?

There is a difference between a "is a" and a "has a" relationship.

This is why I have in the past used the following analogy

Islam is a much a Religion as a dog is a paw.

goethechosemercy said...

Quote:
Sadly it is the women who are often the most backward and worst encouragers of Islamic thinking. And I say that as a woman, an ex muslim convert, and having lived in Islamic society for 8 years. I always found the men far more open to thinking outside the box.
end quote.

First of all, I'm glad that you are now free. You deserve to be free, and I believe that God intended you to be so. The reason the men would have been much better at thinking outside the box is that in Islam, the men are free, the women are not.
The men are clean, the women are filth incarnate.
Islam uses a dualistic perspective, polarizing the freedom and expressiveness of men against the enslavement and silence of women.
If you convince a butterfly that it has no wings, it probably will not even try to fly.
The Muslim woman is the butterfly or bird that has been convinced it has no wings.
Or, perhaps, the operatic singer who becomes convinced that she has no voice.
Women must stop destroying themselves in the name of Islam, women must stop destroying themselves period.

Baron Bodissey said...

Hesperado, Mr. Recursive X, et al. --

I don’t usually jump in on these discussions, but I feel compelled to throw in my two cents’ worth here.

My primary job is to be a propagandist: that is, my aim as an activist in the Counterjihad cause is to move the meme. Or, more fully, to move multiple memes.

Only by breaking through the dominant paradigms with subversive memes will we bring down the hegemony of the PC/MC establishment which rules the media, the academy, the media, and the culture at large.

Political correctness currently has an absolute lock on the major media, so propagating memes is extremely difficult. Yes, it helps to get one of our people on TV as a talking head, but the setup in such situations is almost always rigged to make the interviewee look nutty or dangerous, so the value of such appearances is limited.

For large-scale effectiveness, we must proceed more stealthily, and with more limited goals. Each step is small, and seems inconsequential, but when aggregated, our tiny successes have an effect, and will accelerate the change in our direction when things go sideways for the oligarchs.

To do the job, we must insert many, many memelets into common discourse. This must be accomplished at a level well below that of the celebrities and famous pundits, because action on that battlefield invites a massive and well-funded counterattack by CAIR, ISNA, the OIC, etc.

[continued...]

Baron Bodissey said...

[continued from previous]

I’ve been paying close attention for the last seven years, and during that time there have been numerous changes in the common discourse at the samizdat level, below what is officially permitted. For example, the phrase “Mohammed the pedophile” is now common — almost universal — in popular forums and discussion groups. It even pops up at the higher levels occasionally, and gets people like Susanne Winter and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff charged and tried. This meme was very rare until well after 9-11.

You might say, “It’s not, strictly speaking, true — Mohammed’s marriage to a child was a commonly accepted practice in his day, among both Muslims and non-Muslims. It was not considered pedophilia back then. Asserting this is an example of the fallacy of ‘presentism’.”

These counterarguments are reasonable, and they may well be true. But they don’t advance the meme.

It’s the same with “Islam is not a religion.” This concept was all but unheard of just six or seven years ago. But now it is common currency.

To push memes like these into mass circulation, they must be oversold. If we spend all our time fine-tuning them, they won’t emerge into popular consciousness. If we include the historical background, the comparative theology, the philosophical references, and all the subtle nuances of the whole truth, the meme will never spread.

As a propagandist, my task is to spread the meme and not to sweat the nuances. Nuances can be argued about and nailed down by scholars in the centuries after Islam — as a culture, political ideology, and religion — is totally destroyed. We don’t have the luxury for such finicky scholasticism right now.

If I wanted to be totally accurate, I might say something like this: “Islam contains religious, political, and cultural ideologies that are fused into a unitary system. Unlike Christianity and Judaism, its political elements have never been separated from its theological ones. Those elements are totalitarian and expansionist.”

Now, that’s fairly accurate, and it’s about as short a statement as you can craft and still include the nuances of the situation. But as a meme, it’s a bust. You can squeeze the trigger on that particular rhetorical gun, and the bullet will just roll out the barrel and plop into the dust at your feet.

Ordinary people understand the essence of what is intended when someone says, “Islam is not a religion.” They know that it means that Islam is not like modern Christianity. They understand that it refers to the fact that Muslim zealots will lie, steal, cheat, rape, torture, murder, and blow up trains and airplanes to attain political ends. That’s not what they consider a religion.

They know all these things already. Despite the intensive indoctrination they’ve been subjected to for forty years, the truth comes through: they see the dismembered bodies and the burning buildings and the disfigured women, and they understand that “Allahu Akhbar” is involved in virtually every single incident.

So the meme works, because it is true at an essential level.

But we have to oversell it to get it out there on everyone’s lips.

Our propaganda is aimed at changing minds at the margin, at affecting the thinking of those whose opinions are not yet fully formed. If we wait until we get every jot and tittle of our message perfect, the scimitar will be at our throats before we change a single mind.

Zenster said...

XXXXXXXXXXXXX: Why should a totalitarian political system and religion be mutually exclusive concepts?

As Islam so deftly illustrates, nothing of the sort need be the case.

None of that changes one whit how vitally important it is to ensure that Islam is foremost and primarily viewed by a majority of outsiders as a political ideology.

As far as I see it, a religion is a belief system that encompasses both normative morality and supernaturalism. Islam meets both criteria, so it seems like a religion to me.

Chalk one up for Islam. You have just fallen prey to its most fundamental and lethal masquerade.

I have created a meme that exposes why Islam does not qualify as a religion:

IF THERE IS NO SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE, IT'S NOT A CHURCH, IT'S A STATE.

There is no other religion on earth that is totally incapable of coexisting with some separation of church and state. Quibbles about ultra-orthodox Judaism simply do not apply on the same scale as Islam.

ISLAM CANNOT COEXIST WITH SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE.

Why should Islam be granted a privilege that no other religion on earth demands? More importantly, why should Islam's ostensibly benign religious trappings − and "benign" is one thing that they most clearly ARE NOT − be allowed to overshadow its highly toxic political doctrine?

This is especially so in light of the fact that Islam's religious and political doctrines are entirely lethal to all other cultural or spiritual motifs.

What motivates this notion that Islam is not a religion? Is it that the word religion has a positive connotation to some, so they wish to separate anything they dislike from it?

One could easily use such a cute and convenient distinction but it would be entirely misplaced with respect to the identifying the tremendously malignant properties of Islam.

That would explain this talk about Islam being a "prison" somehow contradicting the notion that it is a religion.

This discussion could be sidetracked with a lengthy deliberation about how a "religion" that utterly denies all possiblity of Free Will and demands involuntary submission isn't much of a "religion" but that would be a disservice to the current topic, at best.

I also suspect that this is a "freedom of religion" issue. If Islam is not a religion, it doesn't have the same protections from the state as does Christianity in any place that guarantees religious freedom.

And that would be one Hell of a good starting point because Islam so thoroughly abuses the Western notion of "freedom of religion" and Constitutional religious protections that an adequate description of those abuses would require several additional pages of comments.

If Islam is not a religion, it wouldn't be unconstitutional for a the government to do things like ban the construction of mosques.

Well, DUH! For gits and shiggles, let's illuminate this discussion with the light of reciprocity.

Does Islam permit the construction of churches or synagogues anywhere within Muslim majority lands?

No? Well then, why should the West feel at all obliged to permit any spread of an ideology that is an openly avowed enemy of everything held dear by Western cultures?

Islam wants to have its cake and eat it too. What compelling reason is there to tolerate that which no other genuine religion demands of Western culture?

The correct answer is, "none".

Zenster said...

doxRaven: Islam is a much a Religion as a dog is a paw.

It would be unforgivably lax of me if I did not again highlight doxRaven's superb expository meme. This is one that deserves immediate adoption and regular use by the counterjihad.

Supposed "religion" is but one of several pillars that Islam's props itself up with. When a person examines how extraordinarily rare in all history it has been for ANY country or culture to voluntarily adopt Islam, the "paw" of religion is revealed for the gimped leg that it really is.

VIOLENCE plays a far more important and indispensable role in spreading Islam than "religion" ever will or ever has before at any time. What does this tell us about the "religious" nature of Islam?

What other authentic religion on earth places value upon forced conversion in the same way that Islam does and always has? What spiritual message is sent by a belief system that gives currency to involuntary adoption of its creed?

To say that they are mutually self-canceling is an understatement, at least.

doxRaven said...

Zenster: It would be unforgivably lax of me if I did not again highlight doxRaven's superb expository meme. This is one that deserves immediate adoption and regular use by the counterjihad.

Thank Zenster, appologies for the typo, it should be

Islam is as much a Religion as a dog is a paw.

goethechosemercy said...

Islam has far too many secular elements and imperatives to be a religion.
Its history is not one of proselytization, but of conquest.
The spreading of the faith through terror and violence continues.
A religion? No, not by a lnog shot.
Islam really is an anti-individualistic, anti-Western ideology.
Diametrically opposed to every Western value.