VICKI checked e-mail late that night in Illinois. She was relieved to see a message from Judd. He briefly explained what had happened at Teddy Kollek Stadium and how Mr. Stein had escaped a Global Community prison. We’re trying to get back as fast as we can, but there may be problems , Judd wrote. I’ll write again and tell when you can expect us. Lionel sends his best and so do I. Hope things have worked out with Melinda. Judd .
Vicki frowned. When Judd was gone from the group she felt an emptiness that wouldn’t go away. When he was there, he and Vicki fought. She still had feelings for him, still missed him, but she had no idea what to do with those feelings. She pushed the thoughts from her mind and scanned the other messages. She sat up straight when she saw another e-mail to Mark. It was from the same person who had written earlier from the GC.
She called out to Mark. Mark came quickly. Vicki read over Mark’s shoulder as he opened the message. Dear Mark , My intentions are pure. I’m at a GC outpost in South Carolina, recovering from injuries I received on the Peacekeeper 1. Your cousin, John Preston, saved my life . I want to meet with you. I’d like to tell you what happened, since the GC has kept the story quiet. Can you come here? If not, I can come to you as soon as I’m released from the hospital . Please write and let me know. You can trust me . Sincerely, Carl Meninger
Mark scratched his chin. He opened a computer filing cabinet filled with other e-mails.
“What are you doing?” Vicki said.
“That name sounds familiar,” Mark said. He did a search of the name Meninger and came up with nothing. Then he typed in the name Carl. A single e-mail appeared on the screen. It was John’s last message. “This is it,” Mark said. At the end of the message John had written, Someday I hope you meet Carl. He can tell you what happened here. No time now. Just enough to say I love you all. Keep fighting the good fight. We’ll be cheering you on. Never give up. John .
Buck’s personal pilot, Ken Ritz, is dead. He was killed by Global Community Police while trying to help the rest of the Tribulation Force get away as Rayford piloted Tsion and Chloe quickly. Buck has been falsely accused of murdering one of their policemen and is wanted dead or alive. But as Rayford moved along the runway, Buck could only grab the wire that supported the door. As the plane rose into the sky, Buck wrestled with the wire until he broke free and dropped from the plane into the underbrush beneath him that was very close to the airport. Buck has literally been left behind.
Rayford decided to fly north as fast as he could, guessing that GC forces would assume he was heading west. “Tsion, dig through Ken’s stuff and see if he has any record of friends of his in Greece. He mentioned our putting down there or Turkey if necessary.”
Tsion and Chloe opened Ken’s flight bag. “This is painful, Rayford,” Tsion said. “This brother flew me to safety when there was a bounty on my head.”
Rayford could not speak. He and Ken had clicked so quickly that he had made an instant friend. Because of their hours together in the air, he’d spent more time with him than anyone but Buck. And being closer to Ken’s age, he felt a true kinship. He knew violence and death were the price of this period of history, but how he hated the shock and grief of the losses. If he began thinking of all the tragedy he had suffered—from missing out on the Rapture with his wife and son, to the loss of Bruce, Loretta, Donny and his wife, Amanda . . . and there were more—he would go mad. Ken was in a better place, he told himself, and it sounded as hollow as any platitude. Yet he had to believe it was true. The loss was all his. Ken was finally free.
Rayford was bone weary. He was not supposed to be handling the flight back. Ken had reserved his hours behind the controls so he could pilot the Tribulation Force back to the States.
“What is all this?” Chloe asked suddenly. “He’s got lists and ideas and plans for businesses, and—”
“I’ll tell you later,” Rayford said. “He was quite the entrepreneur.”
“And brilliant,” Tsion said. “I never figured him for this kind of thinker. Some of this reads like a manifesto of survival for the saints.” “No names though?
“Nothing that looks like a contact in Greece? I’m going to start that way, just in case. I can’t fly much farther anyway.”
“But we can’t land without a local contact, can we, Dad?”
“We shouldn’t.”
“Can Mac help?”
“He’d call me if he was free to talk. I’m sure they’ve involved him in this fiasco. Pray he’ll somehow misdirect them.”
The highly respected Chaim Rosenzweig has three houseguests, two of them are wanted by the Global Community police – Rabbi Ben Judah and Buck Williams. Buck’s wife, Chloe, is pregnant and with them. In a hilarious scene, Chaim and Buck search for Jacov, a recovering alcoholic who is Chaim’s chauffeur. They go to a very seedy bar called “The Harem” because that’s where Jacov always went when he went back to his drinking. But instead Jacov was there standing on a table and preaching Christ! Afterward Buck drove alone to the Wailing Wall. A huge crowd was there including many of the GC police. When a man with a high-powered rifle begins moving toward the Wall, the witnesses give him grave warning. But as the police also begin to move in, the two witnesses completely disappear. Carpathia (the Antichrist) has announced to the world by television that if the two witnesses left the Wailing Wall, they were to be captured or shot by anyone on site. Ray picks the story up at this point
Meanwhile,Ken Ritz has flown Rayford back to Israel in order for Rayford to help Buck, Chloe, and the Rabbi escape back to the states.
Just after noon on Thursday in Chicago, Rayford and Ken joined Doc Charles and Hattie to watch the Meeting. The pilots had their flight plans out and doodled with charting their course to the Middle East. Assuming word got to Tsion, he would announce something official or ceremonious for Saturday, and that would trigger Rayford and Ken’s attempt to get to Israel. They would plan to arrive around midnight Friday and pick up their passengers shortly thereafter. Rayford’s head jerked up as all four watchers heard Tsion say,
“I plan to summarize all this in a small thank-you session to the local committee on Saturday at noon, when we meet near the Temple Mount.”
“Bingo!” Rayford said. “Teach me the Gulfstream this afternoon, so I can share the load both ways.”
“Long as you’re confident of chopper duty. Got one lined up?”
“That part’ll be easy. Hoo, boy, back in the battle!”
Hattie gave Rayford a long look. “You like this stuff?” “Funny you would ask that,” he said, “knowing how you feel about Carpathia.” “I expect to die going after him. You act like you can’t lose.”
“We’ve already won,” Ritz said. “It’s just a matter of going through the motions. The Bible’s already told the story, and as Tsion says, ‘We win.’”
Hattie shook her head and rolled onto her side, her back to them. “You’re pretty glib for dealing with a man like Nicolae.”
Ken caught Rayford’s eye. “You realize when we have to leave, with the time change and all? Well, ’course you do. You been flyin’ these routes a lot longer’n I have.”
LB-TK Darkening Skies Chapters 1&2 Under The Stage, Samuel’s Deception
JUDD gently lowered the guard’s head to the ground, knowing the man had died trying to protect Buck Williams and the others in the Tribulation Force. Footsteps continued to pound on the stage above them. Lionel grabbed the guard’s walkie-talkie. “Come on. We have to get out of here!” Judd and Lionel rolled under the stage and held their breath. The radio squawked in Lionel’s hand. He turned it down.
Two guards jumped from the stage and felt for a pulse on the downed guard. One barked into his radio, “He’s dead, sir.” A voice shot back, “Find the rabbi and those others. I want them dead before they get out of the stadium!”
Judd whispered to Lionel, “We’ve got to stop them!” But before Judd could move, another voice blared on the guard’s radio. “We’ve spotted them in a Mercedes a few blocks from the stadium, sir.” “Probably headed to the Rosenzweig estate,” another voice said. “After them!”
Judd sighed. “Nothing we can do now.”
The stadium was nearly empty. A few stragglers knelt near the stage, praying. Medical personnel attended to the injured. Judd and Lionel watched from the shadows as GC peacekeepers dragged the dead guard away. A cameraman flipped on a light, and a reporter stepped in front of it. “We are live at Teddy Kollek Stadium,” the reporter said. “Just moments ago, this Global Community peacekeeper was murdered at the conference called the Meeting of the Witnesses. Those in the audience listened to a message of love and peace, but it seems someone did not follow their leader’s teaching.”
“No way one of the witnesses shot that guard,” Lionel said.
Judd gritted his teeth. “Carpathia will make Tsion look—”
“What?” Lionel said.
Judd spied a heavyset boy near the front row. “I know that kid,” he said.
When the Global Community guards were gone, Judd and Lionel crept from under the stage and approached the boy. The boy’s mouth dropped open. “Judd,” the boy said, “what are you doing here?”
“How do I know you?” Judd said.
LB-TK Darkening Skies Chapters 1&2 Under The Stage, Samuel’s Deception
Nicolae Carpathia had made a fool of himself on worldwide television and that the Teddy Kollek Stadium in Jerusalem. After he began to speak to a crowd of many thousands at the stadium, his voice began to give out on him. Someone from the crowd handed him a bottle of water, but when he drank it blood came out and he choked on it. Swearing and screaming at Christian Rabbi Tsion Ben Judah, who was the reason all the people had come, he gasped and left the stage. But not for long. He soon returned with murder in his eyes. Meanwhile, Hattie’s ( and the Antichrist’s baby died at birth and Hattie no longer wants to live. Rayford, Dr. Charles, and Ken Ritz are with her and encouraging her to live. Ray picks the story up at this point. Join him now.
Buck grew nervous in the van, waiting for Chloe and Tsion. He assumed she would hustle Tsion from the stage; thousands would have given anything for a moment with him, not to mention committee members who might want a word. And no one knew how Carpathia might respond to what had happened on stage. He initially blamed it on Tsion, but then the witnesses had appeared. Buck thought Nicolae should realize that Tsion had no miraculous powers. Nicolae’s quarrel was with the two witnesses. It was his own fault, of course. He had not been invited, or even welcomed, on stage. And the gall to have Fortunato and the pompous Peter the Second precede him! Buck shook his head. What else from the Antichrist?
Buck dialed Chloe’s number but got no answer. A busy signal he could understand. But no answer? A recorded voice spoke in Hebrew. “Jacov, listen to this. What is she saying?” Jacov was still beaming, having craned his neck and leaned out the window to see others’ marks. He often pointed to his own and learned that fellow believers always smiled and seemed to enjoy pointing heavenward. The day would come, Buck knew, when the sign of the cross on the forehead would have to say everything between tribulation saints. Even pointing up would draw the attention of enemy forces. The problem was, the day would also come when the other side would have its own mark, and it would be visible to all. In fact, according to the Bible, those who did not bear this “mark of the beast” would not be able to buy or sell. The great network of saints would then have to develop its own underground market to stay alive.
Jacov put the phone to his ear, then handed it back to Buck. “If you want to leave a message, press one.” Buck did. “Chloe,” he said, “call me as soon as you get this. The crowd out here hasn’t thinned a bit, so I don’t want to have to come and find you and Tsion. But I will if I don’t hear from you in ten minutes.” As soon as he ended the call, his phone chirped. “Thank God,” he said and flipped it open. “Yeah, babe.”
Ray begins reading the final three chapters of the 17th book in the 40 book series of Left Behind-The Kids: Nicolae’s Speech, Reason to Kill, and Death in the Stadium. Those titles alone should show you this will be a very tense three chapters. Taylor Graham who flew Judd, Lionel, and Mr. Stein, to Israel, has moved out of the stands at the packed Teddy Kolleck Stadium with one goal on his mind. Judd has realized what that goal is and has left Lionel and Mr. Stein in the stands to stop him.
Meanwhile, Z has brought notebooks and pens to Vicki and those in the schoolhouse. They are seated watching events at the stadium over a television set, waiting for Tsion Ben Judah to speak to the crowd including many of the 144,000 Jewish evangelists. Mark has left the group and is now on his own with the Lord. Ray picks the story up at this point.
As Nicolae Carpathia stepped to the podium Judd slipped from his seat. “If I’m not back before this ends, stay here,” Judd said to Lionel. Taylor Graham was still moving when Judd caught up to him.
“What are you doing?” Judd whispered.
Taylor whirled, ready to fight. When he recognized Judd, he rolled his eyes and put a finger to his lips. “I came to hear Carpathia.”
“Fellow citizens of the Global Community,” as your potentate, I welcome you to Israel and to this great arena, named after a man of the past, a man of peace and harmony statesmanship.”
Judd knew what Nicolae was doing. He was trying to win the crown by talking about a well-known Israeli.
This is Ray Mossholder from the headquarters of Reach More Now in Fort Worth, Texas, and this is Today in History. These are the stories that have made news throughout history – stories that happened on
AUGUST 4
For example, observations in North and South China and Japan of a supernova in 1181 were recorded independently at different locations in North and South China and Japan beginning on August 4. These descriptions fixed the position of the star consistent with the radio source 3C 58, and indicate that it was visible for up to 186 days. Today’s scientists are still studying it. There have only been five appearances of supernovas since God created the heavens and the Earth.
Two On August 4,1753, Virginian George Washington was declared a Master Mason in a Masonic ritual performed by his fellow Freemasons during a secret ceremony in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Washington, who belonged to Alexandria Lodge No. 22, had been initiated into the Masons at age 20 on November 4, 1752. The following year, on March 3, 1753, he passed as a “Fellow Craft.” Five months later, Washington was raised to the rank of Master Mason. Washington was 21 years old and would soon command his first military operation as a major in the Virginia colonial militia.
Freemasonry evolved from the practices and rituals of the stonemasons’ guilds in the Middle Ages. With the decline of European cathedral building, “lodges” decided to admit non-stonemasons to maintain membership, and the secret fraternal order grew in popularity in Europe. In 1717, the first Grand Lodge, an association of lodges, was founded in England, and Freemasonry was soon disseminated throughout the British Empire. The first American Mason lodge was established in Philadelphia in 1730, and future revolutionary leader Benjamin Franklin was a founding member.
There is no central Masonic authority, and Freemasons are governed locally by the order’s many customs and rites. Members trace the origins of Masonry back to the erecting of King Solomon’s Temple in biblical times and are expected to believe in the “Supreme Being,” as well as in the soul’s immortality, and were expected to promote, in Washington’s words, “private virtue and public prosperity” and advocate for religious tolerance. Fellow Masons referred to each other as “Brother.”
Masons follow specific religious rites, and maintain a vow of secrecy concerning the order’s ceremonies. The Masons of the 18th century adhered to liberal democratic principles that included religious toleration, loyalty to local government, and the importance of charity. From its inception, Freemasonry encountered considerable opposition from organized religion, especially from the Roman Catholic Church.
For George Washington, joining the Masons was a rite of passage and an expression of his civic responsibility. After becoming a Master Mason, Washington had the option of passing through a series of additional rites that would take him to higher “degrees.” In 1788, shortly before becoming the first president of the United States, Washington was elected the first Worshipful Master of Alexandria Lodge No. 22.
Masonic rites were witnessed at such events as Washington’s presidential inauguration and the laying of the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.–a city designed with Masonic symbols throughout it.
Masonic symbols, approved by Washington in the design of the Great Seal of the United States, can be seen on the one-dollar bill. The All-Seeing Eye above an unfinished pyramid is unmistakably Masonic, and the scroll beneath, which proclaims the advent of a “New Secular Order” in Latin, is one of Freemasonry’s long-standing goals. The Great Seal appeared on the dollar bill during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, also a Mason.
According to published eyewitness reports, George Washington performed Masonic rites at the laying of the U.S. Capitol’s cornerstone on September 18, 1793. Wearing an apron embroidered with Masonic symbols, Washington led a ceremony laced with the society’s rituals. The apron, along with the trowel and tools used to set the Capitol’s cornerstone in place, is currently housed at the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia.
Many other leaders of the American Revolution, including Paul Revere, John Hancock, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Boston Tea Party saboteurs, were also Freemasons, Freemasonry has continued to be important in U.S. politics, and at least 15 presidents, five Supreme Court chief justices, and numerous members of Congress have been Masons. Presidents known to be Masons include Washington, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Gerald Ford.
In 1923, the national organization of Freemasons purchased the former Revolutionary War site of Shooter’s Hill in Alexandria, Virginia, in order to build a monument to their most esteemed Brother Washington. Assisting in the groundbreaking ceremonies were President Calvin Coolidge and former President William H. Taft, both Masons. Harry Truman, a former Grand Master Mason for Missouri, dedicated a statue of Washington at the memorial in 1950.
Today there are an estimated two million Masons in the United States, but the exact membership figure is one of the society’s many many deeep and many believe very dark secrets.
The Roman Catholic Church specifically warns its members to never join the Masons. In 1983, Prefect Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the personal approval of Pope John Paul II, went so far as to create a Declaration on Masonic Associations, which reiterated the Church’s objections to Freemasonry.[29] The Declaration states:
“The faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion….” and “…the Church’s negative judgment in regard to Masonic association(s) remains unchanged since their principles have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership in them remains forbidden.”[29]
In 1980, after years of study, including dialogue with Freemasons, the German Bishops Conference addressed this question, producing a report on Freemasonry listing twelve points and allegations.[13]
Among the allegations were that Freemasonry denies revelation[14] and objective truth.[15] They also alleged that religious indifference is fundamental to Freemasonry,[16] that Freemasonry is Deist,[17] and that it denies the possibility of divine revelation,[18] so threatening the respect due to the Church’s biblical teachings.
The sacramental character of Masonic rituals was seen as signifying an individual transformation,[20] offering an alternative path to perfection[21] and having a total claim on the life of a member[22] It concludes by stating that all lodges are forbidden to Catholics,[23] including Catholic-friendly lodges[24] and that German Protestant churches were also suspicious of Freemasonry.
The myriad of Protestant churches with so many different denominations take individual stances regarding the Freemasons. Evangelicals and fundamentalists almost in total, warn against joining the Freemasons. The careful and scholarly study over many years conducted by the Roman Catholic Church regarding the Freemasons is highly worth studying for any who want to get as close as possible to the truths about them.
Meanwhile, the Freemasons themselves remain silent and because of the extreme secrecy of this organization they continue to present themselves as a deep dark secret.
August 4, 1783 – Mount Asama erupted in Japan, killing about 1,400 people. The eruption caused a famine, which resulted in an additional 20,000 deaths.
August 4, 1821 –
Reverend William C. Blair, the first Sunday School missionary of the United States, begins his work. In his first year, he will travel twenty-five hundred miles, mostly on horseback, visiting six states, founding sixty-one Sunday schools, inspecting thirty-five others, establish four adult schools, and six tract societies. When giving his report, he will apologize that illness hindered him from doing more. The Sunday and Adult School Union will be so impressed, however, that they will hire additional missionaries.
You’ve no doubt heard the saying from someone about the weather “It’s hotter than H E double toothpicks”. Well, I’ll bet they were saying that in Seville Spain on August 4, 1881, because it was 122ø F (50ø C), in the heat of that day there.
In 1889 on this day – The Great Fire of Spokane, Washington destroyed 32 blocks of that city. Workers quickly rushed to Spokane to help rebuild those charred blocks. It was a massive building project.
1892, August 4, Andrew and Abby Borden were found hacked to death in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home. Andrew was discovered in a pool of blood on the living room couch, his face nearly split in two. Abby was upstairs, her head smashed to pieces; it was later determined that she was killed first.
Suspicion soon fell on one of the Bordens’ two daughters, Lizzie, age 32 and single, a Sunday school teacher who lived with her wealthy father and stepmother and was the only other person besides their maid, Bridget Sullivan, who was home when the bodies were found. Lizzie Borden was arrested and charged with the double homicide. As a result of the crime’s sensational nature, her trial attracted national attention.
Lizzie Andrew Borden was born on July 19, 1860. Her mother died when Lizzie was a young girl and her father, who became a bank president and successful businessman, married Abby Gray, who helped raise Lizzie and her older sister Emma. The sisters reportedly despised their stepmother and, as adults, argued with their father over money matters. Lizzie claimed she was in the barn at the time of the murders and entered the house later that morning to find her father dead in the living room.
The evidence that the prosecution presented against Borden was circumstantial. It was alleged that she tried to buy poison the day before the murders and that she burned one of her dresses several days afterward.
Despite the fact that fingerprint testing was already becoming commonplace in Europe at the time, the police failed to believe in its trustworthiness and refused to test for prints on the murder weapon—a hatchet—found in the Borden’s basement.
The prosecution tried to prove that Lizzie had burned a dress similar to the one she was wearing on the day of the murders and had purchased a small axe the day before. But Lizzie was a sweet-looking Christian woman and the jury took only 90 minutes to decide that she could never commit such a hideous crime.
Lizzie inherited a substantial sum after her father’s death, and moved from the murder site into a different home, where she lived until her death on June 1, 1927. Today, the house where the Borden murders occurred is a bed and breakfast. Despite Lizzie Borden’s acquittal, the cloud of suspicion that hung over her never disappeared. She is immortalized in a famous rhyme:
Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.
Ignoring the taunts, Lizzie lived the high life until her death in 1927. She was buried in the family plot next to her parents.
Also on August 4, 1892 –
Dr. Wilfred T. Grenfell arrives in Labrador to work with colonists who have little medical attention, live in poverty, and are deeply in debt to company stores. The twenty-six-year-old English medical missionary will ply the Labrador shores in his mission boat or ski to where he is needed. Not only does he open hospitals and orphanages but he builds churches and teaches the people practical methods of management. He will work among them for forty-two years, raising funds and recruiting many other doctors, nurses and clergymen to join him.
August 4, 1888 – In a blinding rainstorm, Mary Slessor boarded the canoe of a friendly chief who took her up river to a new work among Nigeria’s people.
This was the day in 1901 when Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong was born.
August 4, 1910, The Philadelphia Athletics pitcher Jack Coombs and Chicago White Sox pitcher Ed Walsh pitched a 16 inning scoreless tie. There were no ballpark lights in 1910 so the game had to be called on account of darkness.
On August 4, 1914, as World War I erupted in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson formally proclaimed the neutrality of the United States, a position that a vast majority of Americans favored.
Wilson’s initial hope that America could be “impartial in thought as well as in action” was soon compromised by Germany’s attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Britain was one of America’s closest trading partners and tension arose between the United States and Germany when several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines.
In February 1915, Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. One month later, Germany announced that a German cruiser had sunk the William P. Frye, a private American vessel that was transporting grain to England when it disappeared. President Wilson was outraged, but the German government apologized and called the attack an unfortunate mistake.
In early May 1915, several New York newspapers published a warning by the German embassy in Washington that Americans traveling on British or Allied ships in war zones did so at their own risk. The announcement was placed on the same page as an advertisement for the imminent sailing of the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner from New York to Liverpool. On May 7, the Lusitania was torpedoed without warning by a German submarine just off the coast of Ireland. Of the nearly 2,000 passengers, 1,201 were killed, including 128 Americans.
It was revealed that the Lusitania was carrying about 173 tons of war munitions for Britain, which the Germans cited as further justification for the attack. The United States eventually sent three notes to Berlin protesting the action, and Germany apologized and pledged to end unrestricted submarine warfare. In November, however, a U-boat sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. Public opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.
In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on April 2, President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany. On April 4, the Senate voted 82 to six to declare war against Germany. Two days later, the House of Representatives endorsed the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally entered World War I.
On June 26, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After four years of a bloody stalemate along the Western Front, the entrance of America’s well-supplied forces into the conflict was a major turning point in the war. By the time the war finally ended on November 11, 1918, more than 2 million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of these men had lost their lives.
The 4th of August 1925 US marines leave Nicaragua after 13-year occupation
Important this day in 1927 – the Peace Bridge between US & Canada opened for the very first time.
August 4, 1929-The Cleveland Indians, down to their last out, scored nine runs in the ninth inning for a 14-6 comeback victory over the New York Yankees.
Today in 1934 New York Giants Mel Ott set a record of 6 runs in one game and helped his Giants beat the Phillies 21-4
On August 4, 1936, American Jesse Owens made the Fuhrer furious. Owens won the gold in the long jump at the Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany. It was the second of four gold medals Owens won in Berlin, as he greatly angered and firmly dispelled German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler’s notion of the superiority of an Aryan “master race,” for all the world to see.
Jesse Owens first made his mark on the international stage at just 21 years old on May 25, 1935, while an undergrad at Ohio State University, by setting three world records and tying another at the Big Ten Championships in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “The Buckeye Bullet” started his afternoon by running the 100-meter dash in just 9.4 seconds to tie the world record.
Just 10 minutes later, Owens jumped 26’8 1/4″, setting a world record he would hold until 1951. And, ten minutes after that, Owens set another world record in the 220-yard dash with a time of 20.3 seconds. Finally, less than an hour after his afternoon of competition started, Owens ran the 220-yard hurdles in 22.6 seconds for his third outright world record of the day. Owens’ impressive performance caused a sensation across the United States, and the track world looked forward to following his progress at the upcoming 1936 Olympics.
Owens was openly derided by Nazi officials prior to his arrival in Berlin because he was a black American; some went so far as to call him and his fellow black athletes “non-humans.” Owens responded on August 3, when he edged out African-American Ralph Metcalfe to win the 100 meters in an impressive 10.3 seconds, a time that would have set the world record if had not been deemed by German officials “wind-aided.”
The next day, August 4, at the Reich Sports Field Stadium, 110,000 spectators watched Owens slam the door on Hitler’s racist theories. In the morning, after fouling on his first two qualifying jumps, Owens finally leaped his way into the final, where he met the young German Lutz Long. Long tied the heavily favored Owens on his second jump, but Owens answered the challenge with a mark of 26′ 5 ½”, the first jump over 26 feet in Olympic history, and an Olympic record that would stand for 24 years. As Owens and Lutz walked arm in arm around the track, the German crowd roared its approval. Hitler promptly left the stadium, missing the medal ceremony.
Owens would win his third gold medal and set his second Olympic record of the games in the 200 meters the next day. On August 9, he followed that up by helping his team set a new world record–39.8 seconds–in the 4 x 100 meter relay. Owens and Metcalfe replaced two American Jews, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, originally scheduled to run the relay that day. Later, the U.S. team was criticized for the move, which was thought to be an appeasement of Hitler and the Nazi party, who would likely have been even angrier to see Jews, already a frequent target of Nazi hate and harassment, bring home a medal.
In 1944 on this day, acting on a tip from a Dutch informer, the Nazi Gestapo captured a 15-year-old Jewish Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse.
In 1947, Anne’s diary was published by Otto in its original Dutch as Diary of a Young Girl. An instant best-seller and eventually translated into more than 50 languages, The Diary of Anne Frank has served as a literary testament to the nearly six million Jews, including Anne herself, who were silenced in the Holocaust.
The Frank family’s hideaway in Amsterdam opened as a museum in 1960. A new English translation of Anne’s diary in 1995 restored material that had been edited out of the original version, making the work nearly a third longer.
On the fourth of August 1948 a 5 day southern filibuster in the Senate succeeded in continuing a poll tax that cost every American a certain amount of money to be allowed to vote. The purpose of the poll tax was not only to raise revenue for state governments, but to keep the poor, especially the Blacks, from being able to vote. The 24th Amendment to the Constitution was created partially to stop the poll tax.
August 4, 1958 – The Billboard Hot 100 was published for the first time. The Billboard Hot 100 is the music industry standard record chart in the United States for singles, published weekly byBillboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on radio play, online streaming, and sales (physical and digital). At the top of the first Billboard Hot 100 on August 4, 1958, was Ricky Nelson singing “Poor Little Fool.”
August 4, 1952, Helicopters from the U.S. Air Force Air Rescue Service land in Germany, completing the first transatlantic flight by helicopter in 51 hours and 55 minutes of flight time.
August 4, 1979
President Jimmy Carter established the Department of Energy.
August 4, 1961
Born on this day he had to have his diapers changed like every other baby. He grew up wanting to change America. Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States of America was born August 4, 1961.
And on this day in 1964, the remains of three civil rights workers whose disappearance on June 21 garnered national attention were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated Mississippi in 1964 to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The third man, James Chaney, was a local African American man who had joined the Congress of Racial Equality in 1963. The disappearance of the three young men led to a massive FBI investigation that was code-named MIBURN, for “Mississippi Burning.”
Michael Schwerner, who arrived in Mississippi as a CORE field worker in January 1964, aroused the animosity of white supremacists after he organized a successful black boycott of a variety store in the city of Meridian and led voting registration efforts for African Americans. In May, Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, sent word that the 24-year-old Schwerner, nicknamed “Goatee” and “Jew-Boy” by the KKK, was to be eliminated. On the evening of June 16, two dozen armed Klansmen descended on Mt. Zion Methodist Church, an African American church in Neshoba County that Schwerner had arranged to use as a “Freedom School.” Schwerner was not there at the time, but the Klansmen beat several African Americans present and then torched the church.
On January 20, Schwerner returned from a civil rights training session in Ohio with 21-year-old James Chaney and 20-year-old Andrew Goodman, a new recruit to CORE. The next day–June 21–the three went to investigate the burning of the church in Neshoba.
While attempting to drive back to Meridian, they were stopped by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price just inside the city limits of Philadelphia, the county seat. Price, a member of the KKK who had been looking out for Schwerner or other civil rights workers, threw them in the Neshoba County jail, allegedly under suspicion for church arson.
After seven hours in jail, during which the men were not allowed to make a phone call, Price released them on bail. After escorting them out of town, the deputy returned to Philadelphia to drop off an accompanying Philadelphia police officer. As soon as he was alone, he raced down the highway in pursuit of the three civil rights workers. He caught the men just inside county limits and loaded them into his car. Two other cars pulled up filled with Klansmen who had been alerted by Price of the capture of the CORE workers, and the three cars drove down an unmarked dirt road called Rock Cut Road. Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were shot to death and their bodies buried in an earthen dam a few miles from the Mt. Zion Methodist Church.
The next day, the FBI began an investigation into the disappearance of the civil rights workers. On June 23, the case drew national headlines, and federal agents found the workers’ burned station wagon. Under pressure from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the FBI escalated the investigation, which eventually involved more than 200 FBI agents and scores of federal troops who combed the woods and swamps looking for the bodies. The incident provided the final impetus needed for the 1964 Civil Rights Act to pass Congress on July 2, and eight days later FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover came to Mississippi to open a new Bureau office. Eventually, Delmar Dennis, a Klansman and one of the participants in the murders, was paid $30,000 and offered immunity from prosecution in exchange for information. On August 4, the remains of the three young men were found. The culprits were identified, but the state of Mississippi made no arrests.
Finally, on December 4, nineteen men, including Deputy Price, were indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for violating the civil rights of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney (charging the suspects with civil rights violations was the only way to give the federal government jurisdiction in the case).
After nearly three years of legal wrangling, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately defended the indictments, the men went on trial in Jackson, Mississippi. The trial was presided over by an ardent segregationist, U.S. District Judge William Cox, but under pressure from federal authorities and fearing impeachment, he took the case seriously. On October 27, 1967, an all-white jury found seven of the men guilty, including Price and KKK Imperial Wizard Bowers. Nine were acquitted, and the jury deadlocked on three others. The mixed verdict was hailed as a major civil rights victory, as no one in Mississippi had ever before been convicted for actions taken against a civil rights worker.
In December, Judge Cox sentenced the men to prison terms ranging from three to 10 years. After sentencing, he said, “They killed one (he used the n word). One Jew, and a white man. I gave them what I thought they deserved.” None of the convicted men served more than six years behind bars.
On June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the three murders, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter. At eighty years of age and best known as an outspoken white supremacist and part-time Baptist minister, he was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
On August 4, 1971, the United States launched Apollo 15, the first satellite into lunar orbit from a manned spacecraft.
Floodwaters finally receded in Luzon, Philippines, on August 4, 1972, revealing devastation and hundreds dead. An torrential rainfall in July had caused rivers all over the large island to flood.
One storm after another battered Luzon in July 1972. Manila received nearly 70 inches of rain during the month. On July 13, a monsoon caused several dikes to fail and 32 people lost their lives in the resulting flood. Less than a week later, a typhoon dropped even more rain on the already saturated region. Dikes throughout the area broke down, flooding large swaths of land. Millions were left homeless and 142 people died. Nearly all major and minor roads were under water or mud.
The flooding continued until the rivers finally peaked on August 4. In addition to the thousands of people forced from their homes, the rice crop for the season was lost. Food riots broke out in several places and looting was rampant. Cholera and typhoid epidemics also resulted.
It was on that same day – August 4, 1972, that Arthur Bremer was sentenced to 63 years in prison for shooting Alabama governor George Wallace.
George Wallace stood behind an 800-pound bulletproof podium each time he delivered a speech. On the heels of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Wallace understood that he was a target. “Somebody’s going to get me one of these days,” he told the “Detroit News.” “I can just see a little guy out there that nobody’s paying any attention to. He reaches into his pocket and out comes the little gun, like that Sirhan guy that got [Robert] Kennedy.”
A few people had noticed the “little guy” in red, white, and blue who led the crowd in cheers at a Laurel, Maryland, campaign stop on May 15, 1972. Cameramen had seen him at other Wallace rallies, had even filmed him in Michigan. When the then-anonymous Arthur Bremer finally got the clear shot of Wallace he’d been waiting for, he fired five times at close range. The violent murder of a political figure that Bremer had sought to distinguish his otherwise unremarkable life didn’t happen.
During an outdoor rally in Laurel, Maryland, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama and a presidential candidate, was shot by 21-year-old Arthur Bremer. Three others were wounded, and Wallace was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. The next day, while fighting for his life in a hospital, he won major primary victories in Michigan and Maryland. However, Wallace remained in the hospital for several months, bringing his third presidential campaign to an irrevocable end.
Wallace, one of the most controversial politicians in U.S. history, was elected governor of Alabama in 1962 under an ultra-segregationist platform. In his 1963 inaugural address, Wallace promised his white followers: “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” However, the promise lasted only six months. In June 1963, under federal pressure, he was forced to end his blockade of the University of Alabama and allow the enrollment of African American students.
Despite his failures in slowing the accelerating civil rights movement in the South, Wallace became a national spokesman for resistance to racial change and in 1964 entered the race for the U.S. presidency. Although defeated in most Democratic presidential primaries he entered, his modest successes demonstrated the extent of popular backlash against integration. In 1968, he made another strong run as the candidate of the American Independent Party and managed to get on the ballot in all 50 states. On Election Day, he drew 10 million votes from across the country.
In 1972, Governor Wallace returned to the Democratic Party for his third presidential campaign and, under a slightly more moderate platform, was showing promising returns when Arthur Bremer shot him on May 15, 1972. After his recovery, he faded from national prominence and made a poor showing in his fourth and final presidential campaign in 1979.
During the 1980s, Wallace’s politics shifted dramatically, especially in regard to race. He contacted civil rights leaders he had so forcibly opposed in the past and asked their forgiveness. In time, he gained the political support of Alabama’s growing African American electorate and in 1983 was elected Alabama governor for the last time with their overwhelming support. During the next four years, the man who had promised segregation forever made more African American political appointments than any other figure in Alabama history.
He announced his retirement in 1986, telling the Alabama electorate in a tearful address that “I’ve climbed my last political mountain, but there are still some personal hills I must climb. But for now, I must pass the rope and the pick to another climber and say climb on, climb on to higher heights. Climb on ’til you reach the very peak. Then look back and wave at me. I, too, will still be climbing.” He died in 1998.
As for his intended assassinator Arthur Bremer, he was born in Milwaukee on August 21, 1950, one of four sons of Sylvia and William Bremer, an abusive, alcoholic couple. Early on, he escaped his ugly reality by pretending that he “‘was living with a television family and there was no yelling at home and no one hit me."” With an unremarkable academic career and no friends to speak of, Bremer found school intolerable. He wrote in the first half of his diary, unearthed in 1980 from its burial place in an excavated landfill (the second half was published, riddled with Bremer’s spelling errors, as “An Assassin’s Diary” in 1973), “‘No English or History test was ever as hard, no math final exam ever as difficult as waiting in a school lunch line alone, waiting to eat alone…while hundreds huddeled & gossiped & roared, & laughed & stared at me…"”
A complete break with his family in October 1971 intensified his isolation. With a bent toward pornography, guns and suicide, he began to frequent a shooting range after his demotion from busboy to kitchen help at the Milwaukee Athletic Club; patrons had complained that he talked to himself. An investigator assigned to the discrimination complaint Bremer filed described him “‘as bordering on paranoia."” Bremer did not accept the investigator’s assistance in arranging professional help; he bought a gun and headed to the Flintrop Arms Center instead.
His first attempts as a marksman proved disastrous. Anxious and inexperienced, Bremer shot holes in the ceiling instead of the target he was aiming at. An arrest followed when he was found asleep in his car, in front of a suburban synagogue, bullets scattered across the front seat. He underwent a rudimentary psychiatric evaluation, but was ultimately only charged with and fined for disorderly conduct.
A turning point for Bremer came around Thanksgiving 1971, when he met 15-year-old Joan Pemrich. Bremer became fixated on the girl; she may have been the first person to respond positively to him. But she broke off their relationship after only three dates because he acted, in her words, “goofy” and “weird.” His inappropriate behavior escalated after the break-up — at one point he shaved his head “to show her that inside I felt as empty as my shaved head” — and on January 13, the same day that George Wallace announced his candidacy for the 1972 presidential election, her mother intervened and told Bremer to leave her daughter alone.
It was March of 1972 when Bremer began his diary. Increasingly lonely, he dreamed of getting attention through assassination. “‘Now I start my diary of my personal plot to kill by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace,"” he wrote in his first entry. Nixon was a divisive figure, and Wallace’s segregationist politics had engendered violence since his first Alabama gubernatorial campaign ten years earlier. But Bremer was not concerned with politics. His plot stemmed from his desire “‘to do SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC , FORCEFULL & DYNAMIC, A STATEMENT of my manhood for the world to see."”
As Bremer debated the merits of his targets — Nixon was more satisfying, Wallace more accessible — he recorded his feelings of self-loathing and delusions of grandeur. Although he hoped the assassination would culminate in his death, his lasting image was of grave importance to him. On the last page of this half of his diary, Bremer decided to call himself an “assassinator.” “Assissns, [sic]” he wrote, “‘is so ordinary."” Despite the name change, he had finally found a group to which he could belong, even elevating himself to the status of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. The image, Bremer wrote, was as important as the act: “Got to think up something cute to shout out after I kill him [Nixon], like Booth did.”
Expecting it to be found and read worldwide after his death, Bremer buried his diary on April 3, the day before he flew to New York to put his plot against Nixon into action. If the intended result had not been so dire, what followed might have been a comedy of errors. Instead, the events of the trip were yet another example of the “awesome incompetence” that Bremer felt stymied by. Both his plans to rent a car to drive to Ottawa and to lose his virginity to a prostitute were foiled. He nearly shot himself after his gun went off accidentally in his hotel room; and finally, as he hid one of his guns in the trunk of his car in preparation for a trip across the border from Wisconsin, he wedged it in so far as to make it unrecoverable.
When Bremer reached Ottawa, security was tight; he feared getting close to Nixon would be impossible. Attending rallies where Nixon was speaking, he became furious with the protestors, who he felt conspired against him, attracting attention that was rightfully his. “A guy tapped me on the shoulder…. He goes in front of me & carefully photographs the speakers. What a dope! Those noise makers were all on news film! He should of photographed the quiet ones. He never pointed his camera at me.”
Bremer was doomed to anonymity again. As his frustration mounted, his diary entries became more explosive. ” I want something to happen,” he wrote on April 24, shortly after his failed trip to Ottawa. “I was supposed to be Dead a week & a day ago. Or at least infamous.” Always keeping an eye toward publication, he threatened to burn his diaries, believing there would be an audience to let down. “Burn all these papers…& no one would ever know 1/2 of it. But I want em all to know. I want a big shot & not a little fat noise… tired of writing about…about what I failed to do again and again.”
Bremer took a ten-day break from writing, apparently to rethink his path to notoriety. When he resumed on May 4, he had decided that “Wallace [would] have the honor” of being his victim. At times excruciating in its detail, the diary faithfully tracked Wallace’s campaign stops, but Bremer saw his latest pursuit as another symbol of his incompetence. “[T]o this man it seems only another failure.… I won’t even rate a T.V. interruption in Russia or Europe when the news breaks …. “I won’t get more than 3 minutes on network TV news. “Ask me why I did it & I’d say ‘I don’t know’, or ‘Nothing else to do’, or ‘Why not?’ or ‘I have to kill somebody."”
August 4, 1988
The United States Senate voted to give each living Japanese-American who was interned during WWII, $20,000 compensation and an apology.
In 2007
NASA launched the Phoenix spacecraft on a mission to Mars.
On August 4, 2012, in London, Oscar Pistorius of South Africa became the first amputee to compete at the Olympics by running in an opening heat of the men’s 400-meter. Pistorius finished second out of five runners and advanced to the semifinals, where he finished eighth out of eight runners. Nicknamed “Blade Runner” because of the J-shaped carbon fiber blades he wears to run, Pistorius inspired people around the world. His image would drastically change early the next year when the star athlete was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend.
Pistorius was born on November 22, 1986, without the fibula (a bone between the calf and ankle) in either of his legs. When he was 11 months old, the Johannesburg native’s legs were amputated below the knees. (Doctors had advised his parents it would be easier to have the procedure done before Pistorius learned to walk.) Growing up, he used prosthetic legs and participated in numerous sports. After injuring his knee playing rugby in high school, he started running track as a form of rehabilitation.
In 2004 Pistorius competed at the Summer Paralympics in Athens, Greece, where he won a gold medal in the 200-meter, with a record-setting time of 21.97 seconds. He also won bronze in the 100-meter. Pistorius soon began competing in meets against able-bodied athletes. However, in January 2008, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAFF), track and field’s governing organization, banned him from able-bodied competitions because it believed Pistorius’ blades, known as “Flex-Foot Cheetahs,” gave him an unfair advantage. The IAFF, which had conducted scientific tests with Pistorius, claimed his blades enabled him to use less energy than able-bodied athletes while covering the same distance, and therefore run faster. Pistorius appealed the IAFF’s ruling, and in May 2008 the Court of Arbitration struck down the IAFF’s decision and the ban was lifted.
Later that same year, at the Paralympics in Beijing, China, Pistorius won gold in the 100-, 200- and 400- meter events, and set a world record of 47.49 seconds in the 400-meter. Over the next few years, he continued to compete against able-bodied athletes. In 2011 he was part of the South African squad that won a silver medal in the 4×400-meter relay at the World Championships in Athletics in South Korea, and in June 2012 he clinched silver in the individual 400-meter at the African Athletics Championships in Benin. The following month, Pistorius was selected to compete for his homeland in the individual 400-meter and 4×400 relay at the Olympics Games in London.
Pistorius began his history-making appearance at the Olympics on August 4, 2012, by taking second place in his five-man preliminary heat in the 400-meter, with a time of 45.44 seconds. At the semifinals the next day, Pistorius finished in last place, with a time of 46.54 seconds, and failed to advance to the finals. On August 9, he was supposed to run the third leg of the 4×400 relay, but his teammate collided with a runner from Kenya before he was able to hand off the baton to Pistorius, and the South Africans did not finish the race. After filing a protest, South Africa was allowed to compete in the finals the next day; the team, anchored by Pistorius, finished in eighth place. At the London Paralympics in September, Pistorius won gold medals with record-setting times in the 400-meter and the 4×100 relay, along with a silver medal in the 200-meter.
Then, on February 14, 2013, Pistorius was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, 29-year-old Reeva Steenkamp, whom he admitted to fatally shooting at his Pretoria, South Africa, home earlier that day. Pistorius claimed he mistook Steenkamp, a model and law graduate, for an intruder. He was charged with premeditated murder, to which he pleaded not guilty when his case went to trial in March 2014, amidst intense media coverage.
That September, Pistorius was found guilty of culpable homicide, the equivalent of manslaughter, but cleared of the more serious charge of murder. In October 2014, the 27-year-old former Olympian was sentenced to five years in prison.
And finally – Tuesday, August 4, 2015 – the top story to this hour……
Fox News has announced the line-up for the prime-time Republican presidential debate on television this Thursday, and here’s who qualified in order of their poll numbers:
#1 Real estate magnate Donald Trump;
#2 Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker;
#3 former Florida Governor Jeb Bush
#4 former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee;
#5 retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson;
#6 Texas Senator Ted Cruz;
#7 Florida Senator Marco Rubio;
#8 Kentucky Senator Rand Paul;
#9 New Jersey Governor Chris Christie;
and #10 Ohio Governor John Kasich.
The roster of 10 candidates was determined based on an average of the five most recent national polls from highly respected poll companies. The drama, rather, was at the edge of the top 10. Christie and Kasich, were hovering by that edge in recent polling and were able to qualify.
Kasich, who leads the state where the debate is being held, said in a statement, “As governor, I am glad to welcome my fellow debate participants to our great state and I look forward to discussing the issues facing our country with them on Thursday.”
But former Texas Governor Rick Perry who placed a very close 11th in the poll and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum who placed 12th and five others, will not be on the prime-time, Fox telecast at 9 p.m. However, the seven who did not make the top 10 have been invited to a separate 5 p.m. Eastern time debate. Aside from Perry and Santorum, this includes Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal; former Hewlett-Packard head Carly Fiorina; South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham; former New York Governor George Pataki; and former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore.
Today President Obama sent an email to everyone saying that he hoped we would watch the Fox debates. It is probable he believes that Thursday night debates will be a second shootout at the Okay Corral.
This is Ray Mossholder and that’s it for August 4. And unless the Lord comes within the next 24 hours, I’ll be back with August fifth tomorrow.
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Is Islam a religion of peace? from TheReligionofPeace.com
The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called‘hypocrites’ and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text. They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.The context of violent passages is more ambiguous than might be expected of a perfect book from a loving God, however this can work both ways. Most of today’s Muslims exercise a personal choice to interpret their holy book’s call to arms according to their own moral preconceptions about justifiable violence. Apologists cater to their preferences with tenuous arguments that gloss over historical fact and generally do not stand up to scrutiny. Still, it is important to note that the problem is not bad people, but bad ideology.Unfortunately, there are very few verses of tolerance and peace to abrogate or even balance out the many that call for nonbelievers to be fought and subdued until they either accept humiliation, convert to Islam, or are killed. Muhammad’s own martial legacy – and that of his companions – along with the remarkable stress on violence found in the Quran have produced a trail of blood and tears across world history.
The Quran: Quran (2:191-193) – “And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And Al-Fitnah [disbelief or unrest] is worse than killing…but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah [disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah] and worship is for Allah alone. But if they cease, let there be no transgression except against Az-Zalimun (the polytheists, and wrong-doers, etc.)” (Translation is from the Noble Quran) The verse prior to this (190) refers to “fighting for the cause of Allah those who fight you” leading some to believe that the entire passage refers to a defensive war in which Muslims are defending their homes and families. The historical context of this passage is not defensive warfare, however, since Muhammad and his Muslims had just relocated to Medina and were notunder attack by their Meccan adversaries. In fact, the verses urge offensive warfare, in that Muslims are to drive Meccans out of their own city (which they later did). Verse 190 thus means to fight those who offer resistance to Allah’s rule (ie. Muslim conquest). The use of the word “persecution” by some Muslim translators is disingenuous (the actual Arabic words for persecution – “idtihad” – and oppression – a variation of “z-l-m” – do not appear in the verse). The word used instead, “fitna”, can mean disbelief, or the disorder that results from unbelief or temptation. This is certainly what is meant in this context since the violence is explicitly commissioned “until religion is for Allah” – ie. unbelievers desist in their unbelief.Quran (2:244) – “Then fight in the cause of Allah, and know that Allah Heareth and knoweth all things.”Quran (2:216) – “Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.” Not only does this verse establish that violence can be virtuous, but it also contradicts the myth that fighting is intended only in self-defense, since the audience was obviously not under attack at the time. From the Hadith, we know that this verse was narrated at a time that Muhammad was actually trying to motivate his people into raiding merchant caravans for loot.Quran (3:56) – “As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.”Quran (3:151) – “Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority”. This speaks directly of polytheists, yet it also includes Christians, since they believe in the Trinity (ie. what Muhammad incorrectly believed to be ‘joining companions to Allah’).
Quran (4:74) – “Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.” The martyrs of Islam are unlike the early Christians, who were led meekly to the slaughter. These Muslims are killed in battle as they attempt to inflict death and destruction for the cause of Allah. This is the theological basis for today’s suicide bombers.
Quran (4:76) – “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah…”
Quran (4:89) – “They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks.”
Quran (4:95) – “Not equal are those of the believers who sit (at home), except those who are disabled (by injury or are blind or lame, etc.), and those who strive hard and fight in the Cause of Allah with their wealth and their lives. Allah has preferred in grades those who strive hard and fight with their wealth and their lives above those who sit (at home). Unto each, Allah has promised good (Paradise), but Allah has preferred those who strive hard and fight, above those who sit (at home) by a huge reward ” This passage criticizes “peaceful” Muslims who do not join in the violence, letting them know that they are less worthy in Allah’s eyes. It also demolishes the modern myth that “Jihad” doesn’t mean holy war in the Quran, but rather a spiritual struggle. Not only is this Arabic word (mujahiduna) used in this passage, but it is clearly not referring to anything spiritual, since the physically disabled are given exemption. (The Hadith reveals the context of the passage to be in response to a blind man’s protest that he is unable to engage in Jihad, which would not make sense if it meant an internal struggle). According to the verse, Allah will allow the disabled into Paradise, but will provide a larger reward to those who are able to kill others in his cause.
Quran (4:104) – “And be not weak hearted in pursuit of the enemy; if you suffer pain, then surely they (too) suffer pain as you suffer pain…” Is pursuing an injured and retreating enemy really an act of self-defense?
Quran (5:33) – “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement”
Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them” No reasonable person would interpret this to mean a spiritual struggle.
Quran (8:15) – “O ye who believe! When ye meet those who disbelieve in battle, turn not your backs to them. (16)Whoso on that day turneth his back to them, unless maneuvering for battle or intent to join a company, he truly hath incurred wrath from Allah, and his habitation will be hell, a hapless journey’s end.”
Quran (8:39) – “And fight with them until there is no more fitna (disorder, unbelief) and religion should be only for Allah” Some translations interpret “fitna” as “persecution”, but the traditional understanding of this word is not supported by the historical context (See notes for 2:193). The Meccans were simply refusing Muhammad access to their city during Haj. Other Muslims were allowed to travel there – just not as an armed group, since Muhammad had declared war on Mecca prior to his eviction. The Meccans were also acting in defense of their religion, since it was Muhammad’s intention to destroy their idols and establish Islam by force (which he later did). Hence the critical part of this verse is to fight until “religion is only for Allah”, meaning that the true justification of violence was the unbelief of the opposition. According to the Sira (Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 324) Muhammad further explains that “Allah must have no rivals.”
Quran (8:57) – “If thou comest on them in the war, deal with them so as to strike fear in those who are behind them, that haply they may remember.”
Quran (8:67) – “It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he had made a great slaughter in the land…”
Quran (8:59-60) – “And let not those who disbelieve suppose that they can outstrip (Allah’s Purpose). Lo! they cannot escape. Make ready for them all thou canst of (armed) force and of horses tethered, that thereby ye may dismay the enemy of Allah and your enemy.”
Quran (8:65) – “O Prophet, exhort the believers to fight…”
Quran (9:5) – “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them.” According to this verse, the best way of staying safe from Muslim violence is to convert to Islam (prayer (salat) and the poor tax (zakat) are among the religion’s Five Pillars). This popular claim that the Quran only inspires violence within the context of self-defense is seriously challenged by this passage as well, since the Muslims to whom it was written were obviously not under attack. Had they been, then there would have been no waiting period (earlier verses make it a duty for Muslims to fight in self-defense, even during the sacred months). The historical context is Mecca after the idolaters were subjugated by Muhammad and posed no threat. Once the Muslims had power, they violently evicted those unbelievers who would not convert.
Quran (9:14) – “Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of a believing people.”Humiliating and hurting non-believers not only has the blessing of Allah, but it is ordered as a means of carrying out his punishment and even “healing” the hearts of Muslims.
Quran (9:20) – “Those who believe, and have left their homes and striven with their wealth and their lives in Allah’s way are of much greater worth in Allah’s sight. These are they who are triumphant.” The Arabic word interpreted as “striving” in this verse is the same root as “Jihad”. The context is obviously holy war.
Quran (9:29) – “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” “People of the Book” refers to Christians and Jews. According to this verse, they are to be violently subjugated, with the sole justification being their religious status. Verse 9:33 tells Muslims that Allah has charted them to make Islam “superior over all religions.” This chapter was one of the final “revelations” from Allah and it set in motion the tenacious military expansion, in which Muhammad’s companions managed to conquer two-thirds of the Christian world in the next 100 years. Islam is intended to dominate all other people and faiths.
Quran (9:30) – “And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah; and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah; these are the words of their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah destroy them; how they are turned away!”
Quran (9:38-39) – “O ye who believe! what is the matter with you, that, when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of Allah, ye cling heavily to the earth? Do ye prefer the life of this world to the Hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the Hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place.” This is a warning to those who refuse to fight, that they will be punished with Hell.
Quran (9:41) – “Go forth, light-armed and heavy-armed, and strive with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah! That is best for you if ye but knew.” See also the verse that follows (9:42) – “If there had been immediate gain (in sight), and the journey easy, they would (all) without doubt have followed thee, but the distance was long, (and weighed) on them” This contradicts the myth that Muslims are to fight only in self-defense, since the wording implies that battle will be waged a long distance from home (in another country and on Christian soil, in this case, according to the historians).
Quran (9:73) – “O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites and be unyielding to them; and their abode is hell, and evil is the destination.” Dehumanizing those who reject Islam, by reminding Muslims that unbelievers are merely firewood for Hell, makes it easier to justify slaughter. It also explains why today’s devout Muslims have little regard for those outside the faith.
Quran (9:88) – “But the Messenger, and those who believe with him, strive and fight with their wealth and their persons: for them are (all) good things: and it is they who will prosper.”
Quran (9:111) – “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth, through the Law, the Gospel, and the Quran: and who is more faithful to his covenant than Allah? then rejoice in the bargain which ye have concluded: that is the achievement supreme.” How does the Quran define a true believer?
Quran (9:123) – “O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness.”
Quran (17:16) – “And when We wish to destroy a town, We send Our commandment to the people of it who lead easy lives, but they transgress therein; thus the word proves true against it, so We destroy it with utter destruction.” Note that the crime is moral transgression, and the punishment is “utter destruction.” (Before ordering the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden first issued Americans an invitation to Islam).
Quran (18:65-81) – This parable lays the theological groundwork for honor killings, in which a family member is murdered because they brought shame to the family, either through apostasy or perceived moral indiscretion. The story (which is not found in any Jewish or Christian source) tells of Moses encountering a man with “special knowledge” who does things which don’t seem to make sense on the surface, but are then justified according to later explanation. One such action is to murder a youth for no apparent reason (74). However, the wise man later explains that it was feared that the boy would “grieve” his parents by “disobedience and ingratitude.” He was killed so that Allah could provide them a ‘better’ son. (Note: This is one reason why honor killing is sanctioned by Sharia. Reliance of the Traveler (Umdat al-Saliq) says that punishment for murder is not applicable when a parent or grandparent kills their offspring (o.1.1-2).)
Quran (21:44) – “We gave the good things of this life to these men and their fathers until the period grew long for them; See they not that We gradually reduce the land (in their control) from its outlying borders? Is it then they who will win?”
Quran (25:52) – “Therefore listen not to the Unbelievers, but strive against them with the utmost strenuousness…” “Strive against” is Jihad – obviously not in the personal context. It’s also significant to point out that this is a Meccan verse.
Quran (33:60-62) – “If the hypocrites, and those in whose hearts is a disease, and the alarmists in the city do not cease, We verily shall urge thee on against them, then they will be your neighbors in it but a little while. Accursed, they will be seized wherever found and slain with a (fierce) slaughter.” This passage sanctions the slaughter (rendered “merciless” and “horrible murder” in other translations) against three groups: Hypocrites (Muslims who refuse to “fight in the way of Allah” (3:167) and hence don’t act as Muslims should), those with “diseased hearts” (which include Jews and Christians 5:51-52), and “alarmists” or “agitators who include those who merely speak out against Islam, according to Muhammad’s biographers. It is worth noting that the victims are to be sought out by Muslims, which is what today’s terrorists do. If this passage is meant merely to apply to the city of Medina, then it is unclear why it is included in Allah’s eternal word to Muslim generations.
Quran (47:3-4) – “Those who disbelieve follow falsehood, while those who believe follow the truth from their Lord… So, when you meet (in fight Jihad in Allah’s Cause), those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them, then bind a bond firmly (on them, i.e. take them as captives)… If it had been Allah’s Will, He Himself could certainly have punished them (without you). But (He lets you fight), in order to test you, some with others. But those who are killed in the Way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost.” Those who reject Allah are to be killed in Jihad. The wounded are to be held captive for ransom. The only reason Allah doesn’t do the dirty work himself is to to test the faithfulness of Muslims. Those who kill pass the test.
Quran (47:35) – “Be not weary and faint-hearted, crying for peace, when ye should be uppermost (Shakir: “have the upper hand”) for Allah is with you,”
Quran (48:17) – “There is no blame for the blind, nor is there blame for the lame, nor is there blame for the sick (that they go not forth to war). And whoso obeyeth Allah and His messenger, He will make him enter Gardens underneath which rivers flow; and whoso turneth back, him will He punish with a painful doom.” Contemporary apologists sometimes claim that Jihad means ‘spiritual struggle.’ Is so, then why are the blind, lame and sick exempted? This verse also says that those who do not fight will suffer torment in hell.
Quran (48:29) – “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard (ruthless) against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves” Islam is not about treating everyone equally. This verse tells Muslims that there are two very distinct standards that are applied based on religious status. Also the word used for ‘hard’ or ‘ruthless’ in this verse shares the same root as the word translated as ‘painful’ or severe’ to describe Hell in over 25 other verses including 65:10, 40:46 and 50:26..
Quran (61:4) – “Surely Allah loves those who fight in His way” Religion of Peace, indeed! The verse explicitly refers to “battle array” meaning that it is speaking of physical conflict. This is followed by (61:9): “He it is who has sent His Messenger (Mohammed) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam) to make it victorious over all religions even though the infidels may resist.” (See next verse, below). Infidels who resist Islamic rule are to be fought.
Quran (61:10-12) – “O You who believe! Shall I guide you to a commerce that will save you from a painful torment. That you believe in Allah and His Messenger (Muhammad ), and that you strive hard and fight in the Cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives, that will be better for you, if you but know! (If you do so) He will forgive you your sins, and admit you into Gardens under which rivers flow, and pleasant dwelling in Gardens of ‘Adn – Eternity [‘Adn (Edn) Paradise], that is indeed the great success.” This verse refers to physical battle in order to make Islam victorious over other religions (see above). It uses the Arabic word, Jihad.
Quran (66:9) – “O Prophet! Strive against the disbelievers and the hypocrites, and be stern with them. Hell will be their home, a hapless journey’s end.” The root word of “Jihad” is used again here. The context is clearly holy war, and the scope of violence is broadened to include “hypocrites” – those who call themselves Muslims but do not act as such.
Other verses calling Muslims to Jihad can be found here at AnsweringIslam.org
From the Hadith:Bukhari (52:177) – Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”Bukhari (52:256) – The Prophet… was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The Prophet replied, “They (i.e. women and children) are from them (i.e. pagans).” In this command, Muhammad establishes that it is permissible to kill non-combatants in the process of killing a perceived enemy. This provides justification for the many Islamic terror bombings.Bukhari (52:65) – The Prophet said, ‘He who fights that Allah’s Word, Islam, should be superior, fights in Allah’s Cause. Muhammad’s words are the basis for offensive Jihad – spreading Islam by force. This is how it was understood by his companions, and by the terrorists of today.Bukhari (52:220) – Allah’s Apostle said… ‘I have been made victorious with terror’Abu Dawud (14:2526) – The Prophet (peace_be_upon_him) said: Three things are the roots of faith: to refrain from (killing) a person who utters, “There is no god but Allah” and not to declare him unbeliever whatever sin he commits, and not to excommunicate him from Islam for his any action; and jihad will be performed continuously since the day Allah sent me as a prophet until the day the last member of my community will fight with the Dajjal (Antichrist)Abu Dawud (14:2527) – The Prophet said: Striving in the path of Allah (jihad) is incumbent on you along with every ruler, whether he is pious or impious
Muslim (1:33) – the Messenger of Allah said: I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah
Bukhari (8:387)– Allah’s Apostle said, “I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: ‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah’. And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally.”
Muslim (1:30) – “The Messenger of Allah said: I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah.”
Bukhari (52:73)– “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Know that Paradise is under the shades of swords’.”
Bukhari (11:626)– [Muhammad said:] “I decided to order a man to lead the prayer and then take a flame to burn all those, who had not left their houses for the prayer, burning them alive inside their homes.”
Muslim (1:149) – “Abu Dharr reported: I said: Messenger of Allah, which of the deeds is the best? He (the Holy Prophet) replied: Belief in Allah and Jihad in His cause…”
Muslim (20:4645) – “…He (the Messenger of Allah) did that and said: There is another act which elevates the position of a man in Paradise to a grade one hundred (higher), and the elevation between one grade and the other is equal to the height of the heaven from the earth. He (Abu Sa’id) said: What is that act? He replied: Jihad in the way of Allah! Jihad in the way of Allah!”
Muslim (20:4696) – “the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: ‘One who died but did not fight in the way of Allah nor did he express any desire (or determination) for Jihad died the death of a hypocrite."”
Muslim (19:4321-4323) – Three separate hadith in which Muhammad shrugs over the news that innocent children were killed in a raid by his men against unbelievers. His response: “They are of them (meaning the enemy).”
Muslim (19:4294) – “When the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) appointed anyone as leader of an army or detachment he would especially exhort him… He would say: Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war… When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them… If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them.”
Bukhari 1:35 “The person who participates in (Holy Battles) in Allah’s cause and nothing compels him do so except belief in Allah and His Apostle, will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty ( if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise ( if he is killed).”
Tabari 7:97 The morning after the murder of Ashraf, the Prophet declared, “Kill any Jew who falls under your power.” Ashraf was a poet, killed by Muhammad’s men because he insulted Islam. Here, Muhammad widens the scope of his orders to kill. An innocent Jewish businessman was then slain by his Muslim partner, merely for being non-Muslim.
Tabari 9:69 “Killing Unbelievers is a small matter to us” The words of Muhammad, prophet of Islam.
Tabari 17:187 “‘By God, our religion (din) from which we have departed is better and more correct than that which these people follow. Their religion does not stop them from shedding blood, terrifying the roads, and seizing properties.’ And they returned to their former religion.” The words of a group of Christians who had converted to Islam, but realized their error after being shocked by the violence and looting committed in the name of Allah. The price of their decision to return to a religion of peace was that the men were beheaded and the woman and children enslaved by the caliph Ali.
ibn Ishaq/Hisham 484: – “Allah said, ‘A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives. A slaughtered enemy is driven from the land. Muhammad, you craved the desires of this world, its goods and the ransom captives would bring. But Allah desires killing them to manifest the religion.’”
Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 990: – Lest anyone think that cutting off someone’s head while screaming ‘Allah Akbar!’ is a modern creation, here is an account of that very practice under Muhammad, who seems to approve.
Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 992: – “Fight everyone in the way of Allah and kill those who disbelieve in Allah.” Muhammad’s instructions to his men prior to a military raid.
Saifur Rahman, The Sealed Nectar p.227-228 – “Embrace Islam… If you two accept Islam, you will remain in command of your country; but if your refuse my Call, you’ve got to remember that all of your possessions are perishable. My horsemen will appropriate your land, and my Prophethood will assume preponderance over your kingship.” One of several letters from Muhammad to rulers of other countries. The significance is that the recipients were not making war or threatening Muslims. Their subsequent defeat and subjugation by Muhammad’s armies was justified merely on the basis of their unbelief.
Additional Notes: Other than the fact that Muslims haven’t killed every non-Muslim under their domain, there is very little else that they can point to as proof that theirs is a peaceful, tolerant religion. Where Islam is dominant (as in the Middle East and Pakistan) religious minorities suffer brutal persecution with little resistance. Where Islam is in the minority (as in Thailand, the Philippines and Europe) there is the threat of violence if Muslim demands are not met. Either situation seems to provide a justification for religious terrorism, which is persistent and endemic to Islamic fundamentalism.The reasons are obvious and begin with the Quran. Few verses of Islam’s most sacred text can be construed to fit the contemporary virtues of religious tolerance and universal brotherhood. Those that do are earlier “Meccan” verses which are obviously abrogated by later ones. The example of Muhammad is that Islam is a religion of peace when Muslims do not have the power and numbers on their side. Once they do, then things change.Many Muslims are peaceful and do not want to believe what the Quran plainly says. They reach subjectively for textual context across different suras to try and mitigate the harsher passages. Even though the Quran itself claims to be clear and complete, Muslim apologists speak of the “risks” of trying to interpret the verses without their “assistance.” Like many religious people, they want the text to fit their pre-established moral framework.Far from being mere history or theological construct, the violent verses of the Quran have played a key role in very real massacre and genocide. This includes the brutal slaughter of tens of millions of Hindus for five centuries beginning around 1000 AD with Mahmud of Ghazni’s bloody conquest. Both he and the later Tamerlane (Islam’s Genghis Khan) slaughtered an untold number merely for defending their temples from destruction. Buddhism was very nearly wiped off the Indian subcontinent. Judaism and Christianity met the same fate (albeit more slowly) in areas conquered by Muslim armies, including the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Europe, including today’s Turkey. Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of a proud Persian people is despised by Muslims and barely survives in modern Iran.So ingrained is violence in the religion that Islam has never really stopped being at war, either with other religions or with itself.Muhammad was a military leader, laying siege to towns, massacring the men, raping their women, enslaving their children, and taking the property of others as his own. On several occasions he rejected offers of surrender from the besieged inhabitants and even butcheredcaptives. He actually inspired his followers to battle when they did not feel it was right to fight, promising them slaves and booty if they did and threatening them with Hell if they did not. Muhammad allowed his men to rape traumatized women captured in battle, usually on the very day their husbands and family members were slaughtered.It is important to emphasize that, for the most part, Muslim armies waged aggressivecampaigns, and the religion’s most dramatic military conquests were made by the actual companions of Muhammad in the decades following his death. The early Islamic principle of warfare was that the civilian population of a town was to be destroyed (ie. men executed, women and children taken as slaves) if they defended themselves. Although modern apologists often claim that Muslims are only supposed to attack in self-defense, this is an oxymoron that is flatly contradicted by the accounts of Islamic historians and others that go back to the time of Muhammad.
Consider the example of the Qurayza Jews, who were completely obliterated only five years after Muhammad arrived in Medina. Their leader opted to stay neutral when their town was besieged by a Meccan army that was sent to take revenge for Muhammad’s deadly caravan raids. The tribe killed no one from either side and even surrendered peacefully to Muhammad after the Meccans had been turned back. Yet the prophet of Islam had every male member of the Qurayza beheaded, and every woman and child enslaved, even raping one of the captives himself (what Muslim apologists might refer to as “same day marriage”).
One of Islam’s most revered modern scholars, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, openly sanctions offensive Jihad: “In the Jihad which you are seeking, you look for the enemy and invade him. This type of Jihad takes place only when the Islamic state is invading other [countries]in order to spread the word of Islam and to remove obstacles standing in its way.” Elsewhere, he notes: “Islam has the right to take the initiative…this is God’s religion and it is for the whole world. It has the right to destroy all obstacles in the form of institutions and traditions … it attacks institutions and traditions to release human beings from their poisonous influences, which distort human nature and curtail human freedom. Those who say that Islamic Jihad was merely for the defense of the ‘homeland of Islam’ diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life.”
The widely respected Dictionary of Islam defines Jihad as “A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad. It is an incumbent religious duty, established in the Qur’an and in the Traditions as a divine institution, and enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling evil from Muslims…[Quoting from the Hanafi school, Hedaya, 2:140, 141.], “The destruction of the sword is incurred by infidels, although they be not the first aggressors, as appears from various passages in the traditions which are generally received to this effect.”
Dr. Salah al-Sawy, the chief member of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America, stated in 2009 that “the Islamic community does not possess the strength to engage in offensivejihad at this time,” tacitly affirming the legitimacy of violence for the cause of Islamic rule – bound only by the capacity for success. (source)
Muhammad’s failure to leave a clear line of succession resulted in perpetual internal war following his death. Those who knew him best first fought to keep remote tribes from leaving Islam and reverting to their preferred religion (the Ridda or ‘Apostasy wars’). Then, within the closer community, early Meccan converts battled later ones. Hostility developed between those immigrants who had traveled with Muhammad to Mecca and the Ansar at Medina who had helped them settle in. Finally there was a violent struggle within Muhammad’s own family between his favorite wife and favorite daughter – a jagged schism that has left Shias and Sunnis at each others’ throats to this day.
The strangest and most untrue thing that can be said about Islam is that it is a Religion of Peace. If every standard by which the West is judged and condemned (slavery, imperialism, intolerance, misogyny, sexual repression, warfare…) were applied equally to Islam, the verdict would be devastating. Islam never gives up what it conquers, be it religion, culture, language or life. Neither does it make apologies or any real effort at moral progress. It is the least open to dialogue and the most self-absorbed. It is convinced of its own perfection, yet brutally shuns self-examination and represses criticism.
This is what makes the Quran’s verses of violence so dangerous. They are given the weight of divine command. While Muslim terrorists take them as literally as anything else in their holy book, and understand that Islam is incomplete without Jihad, moderates offer little to contradict them – outside of opinion. Indeed, what do they have? Speaking of peace and love may win over the ignorant, but when every twelfth verse of Islam’s holiest book either speaks to Allah’s hatred for non-Muslims or calls for their death, forced conversion, or subjugation, it’s little wonder that sympathy for terrorism runs as deeply as it does in the broader community – even if most Muslims personally prefer not to interpret their religion in this way.
Although scholars like Ibn Khaldun, one of Islam’s most respected philosophers, understood that “the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force”, many other Muslims are either unaware or willfully ignorant of the Quran’s near absence of verses that preach universal non-violence. Their understanding of Islam comes from what they are taught by others. In the West, it is typical for believers to think that their religion must be like Christianity – preaching the New Testament virtues of peace, love, and tolerance – because Muslims are taught that Islam is supposed to be superior in every way. They are somewhat surprised and embarrassed to find that this is contradicted by the Quran and the bloody history of Islam’s genesis.
Others simply accept the violence. In 1991, a Palestinian couple in America was convicted of stabbing their daughter to death for being too Westernized. A family friend came to their defense, excoriating the jury for not understanding the “culture”, claiming that the father was merely following “the religion” and saying that the couple had to “discipline their daughter or lose respect.” (source). In 2011, unrepentant Palestinian terrorists, responsible for the brutal murders of civilians, women and children explicitly in the name of Allah were treated to a luxurious “holy pilgrimage” to Mecca by the Saudi king – without a single Muslim voice raised in protest.
For their part, Western liberals would do well not to sacrifice critical thinking to the god of political correctness, or look for reasons to bring other religion down to the level of Islam merely to avoid the existential truth that this it is both different and dangerous.
There are just too many Muslims who take the Quran literally… and too many others who couldn’t care less about the violence done in the name of Islam.
Does the Quran really contain dozens of verses promoting violence?
