out of context?
Muslims, in fact, are more often exhorted by their scriptures to brutalize non-Muslims than Christians are urged by the gospels to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. Yet, though we assume the latter are meant to take the message to heart, we are somehow sure Islam doesn’t really mean what it says — that when Muslims strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, it must be Israel’s fault, or America’s, or something, anything, other than Islam, the only common denominator in these attacks...
Muslims are frequently found carrying out the Koranic directive to “strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.” Actually, make that the Koranic theme, so often is it reiterated in the scriptures devout Muslims take to be the verbatim commands of Allah. (See, e.g., Suras 3:151, 8:12–13, 8:60, 9:5, 33:25–27, 59:2–4, 59:13.) And that is beside the hadith, scriptures in which Mohammed, taken to be the perfect Muslim role model, boasts, “I have been made victorious with terror.” (Bukhari 4.52.220 — just scroll down from
here, through the glories promised to Muslims who wage jihad against the infidels.)..
If you have been reared in a culture that worships suicide bombers, that dehumanizes Jews as the children of monkeys and pigs, and that insists Israel is not merely the enemy but does not have a right to exist. And these positions, it bears emphasizing, do not represent some fringe Islam of al-Qaeda terrorists who have purportedly hijacked an otherwise peaceful religion. This is mainstream Islam, the sorts of things you would hear in a classroom at al-Azhar University or a television show on al-Jazeera — the place where, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, people turn for “real news,” the place where Muslim Brotherhood guru Yusuf Qaradawi lionizes suicide bombers in his popular weekly program, Sharia and Life.
“The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said, ‘The time [of judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: Oh, Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!” That’s not something Osama bin Laden made up. It is right there in the hadith, the authoritative accounts of Mohammed’s words and deeds. As Robert Spencer has demonstrated, variations of this end of times scenario run through the hadith collections of Sahih Muslim (Book 41, nos. 6980-86) and Bukhari (4.52.176 & 177, and 4.56.791.) That is why the story is repeated in Article 7 of the Hamas charter, the document in which the Muslim Brotherhood explains that annihilating Israel is a religious duty. That is why the story is a favorite of Sheikh Qaradawi’s...