It’s Not About Politics or Israel, It’s About Islam and Always Has Been

October 22, 2023 by Milt Harris

The latest Islamic attack conducted by Hamas was not about the politics surrounding the Gaza Strip. It wasn’t even about Israel; those are just the two most recent excuses for a bloodletting that, in the eyes of extremists, is not only justified but obligatory.

Islam was established in Anatolia, but, between the 14th and 16th  centuries, the religion spread via Ottoman conquest to the Balkan Peninsula and central Hungary. The Ottoman state based its authority on religion. The first warrior-sultans expanded the empire in the name of Islam. Sultans claimed the title of caliph, or successor to the Islamic Prophet Muhammad. Alongside the sultans, religious scholars, called ulama, played a significant role in running the state.

The Siege of Vienna in 1529 was the first attempt by the Ottoman Empire to capture the capital city of Vienna, Austria. Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottomans, attacked the city with over 100,000 men while the defenders, led by Niklas Graf Salm, numbered no more than 21,000. Nevertheless, Vienna was able to survive the siege, which ultimately lasted just over two weeks from September 27 to October 15, 1529.

During that first siege of Vienna in 1529, the invading Muslim horde decided that “children were to be cut out of their mother’s wombs and stuck on pikes.” Are we to believe that was just a protest against colonialism or capitalism? When a Muslim chronicle boasted that, during the genocide against the Sikhs in the 18th century, “the shrieks of the women captives who were being raped deafened the ears of the people,” was this a response to globalism or Zionism? Perhaps was this simply Islam.

In 1929, a Muslim mob attacked the Jewish city of Safed. The attackers burst into an orphanage and “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands.” Later that same year, another attack known as the Hebron massacre killed 69 Jews. The event also left scores seriously wounded or maimed. Jewish homes were pillaged, and synagogues were ransacked. Some of the 435 Jews who survived were hidden by local Arab families. The attackers were supposedly triggered to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

The massacre, together with that of Jews in Safed, sent shockwaves through Jewish communities in Palestine and around the world. It led to the re-organization and development of the Jewish paramilitary organization, the Hagenah, which later became the nucleus of the Israel Defense Forces.

On November 17thm 1997, the Luxor massacre took place at Dayr al-Bahri, an archaeological site located across the Nile from the city of Luxor. In a mid-morning attack, six gunmen killed 58 foreign nationals and four Egyptians. The assailants were armed with automatic firearms and knives, and disguised as members of the security forces. They descended on the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut at around 8:45 in the morning. They killed two armed guards at the site. With the tourists trapped inside the temple, the killing went on systematically for 45 minutes, during which many bodies, especially of women, were mutilated with machetes. The body of an elderly Japanese man was also found mutilated. A leaflet was discovered stuffed into his body that read “no to tourists in Egypt” and was signed “Omar Abdul Rahman‘s Squadron of Havoc and Destruction the Gama’ a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group.”

One or more al-Jema’ah al-Islamiyya leaflets were found calling for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman from a U.S. prison, stating that the attack had been carried out as a gesture to exiled leader Mustafa Hamza, declaring: “We shall take revenge for our brothers who have died on the gallows. The depths of the earth are better for us than the surface since we have seen our brothers squatting in their prisons, and our brothers and families tortured in their jails.”

Most of the victims were tourists from Switzerland, which had 36 of its citizens murdered.

On March 27th, 2002, during a Passover Seder, Hamas carried out a suicide bombing. At the Park Hotel in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, the traditional annual Passover seder was held for 250 guests in the hotel dining room located at the ground floor of the hotel.

That evening, a Palestinian bomber, Abdel-Basset Odeh (or Abd Al-Baset Odeh), disguised as a woman approached the hotel carrying a suitcase which contained powerful explosives. The suicide bomber managed to pass the security guard at the entrance to a hotel, walked through the lobby, passing the reception desk, and entered the hotel’s crowded dining room. There, the suicide bomber detonated the explosive device he was carrying. The force of the explosion instantly killed 28 civilians and injured about 140 people, 20 were injured severely. Two of the injured later died from their wounds. Some of the victims were Holocaust survivors. The attack became known as the Passover Massacre.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack. Their spokesman Usama Hamdan said that “this is a trial attempt to send a letter, to send a message, to all the world that we are trying to fight for our own freedom against a terrorist government in Israel led by Sharon” and Israelis “have to expect those attacks from everywhere, from every Palestinian group.” Another Hamas spokesperson Abdel Aziz Rantisi, said “as long as there is occupation, there will be a resistance. He denied that the attack was timed to coincide with the peace initiative of the Saudi government at the Beirut Summit, an initiative rejected by Hamas.

On September 1st, 2004, The Beslan school siege, also referred to as the Beslan school hostage crisis or the Beslan massacre, was a terrorist attack that lasted three days, involved the imprisonment of more than 1,100 people as hostages, including 777 children, and ended with the deaths of 333 people, 186 of them children, as well as 31 of the attackers. It is considered to be the deadliest school shooting in history.

The hostage-takers were members of the Riyad-us Saliheen, sent by the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who demanded Russian withdrawal from and recognition of the independence of Chechnya. On the third day of the standoff, Russian security forces stormed the building.

During the siege, two teachers were beheaded, but not the girls. “We do not kill women. We will just enslave them,” the Jihadists promised.

On September21st, 2013, four masked gunmen attacked the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. There are conflicting reports about the number killed in the attack, since part of the mall collapsed due to a fire that started during the siege. The attack resulted in 71 total deaths, including 62 civilians, five Kenyan soldiers, and all four gunmen. Approximately 200 people were wounded in the massacre.

The extremist Islamic group al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the incident, which it characterized as retribution for the Kenyan military‘s deployment in the group’s home country of Somalia.

The Manchester Arena bombing was an Islamic terrorist suicide bombing of the Manchester Arena in Manchester, England, on May 22nd, 2017, following a concert by American pop singer Ariana Grande. Perpetrated by Islamic extremist Salman Abedi and aided by his brother, Hashem Abedi, the bombing occurred at 10:31 p.m. and killed 22 people, injured 1,017, and destroyed the arena’s foyer. It was the deadliest act of terrorism and the first suicide bombing in the United Kingdom since the July 7th,  2005 London bombings.

The perpetrator was motivated by the deaths of Muslim children resulting from the American-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War. Carrying a large backpack, he detonated an improvised explosive device containing triacetone triperoxide (TATP) with nuts, bolts, and nails serving as shrapnel. Nails had to be pulled from the faces of many of the injured.

An outraged Prime Minister Theresa May said, “This attack stands out for its appalling, sickening cowardice, deliberately targeting innocent, defenseless children and young people.”

Notice that every attack has some weak excuse for the murders that take place. Most are paper thin. The most recent attack was supposedly because the border wall suppresses them and makes them feel like their lair is an “open air prison.”

The truth is that each attack manifests itself out of Islam. No one wants to admit that fact, lest they are called Islamophobic. Instead, we allow the weak excuses that are offered to justify their barbarism. When Muslims gang raped and sawed in half a Hindu schoolteacher in Kashmir, it was about India’s treatment of Muslims. When they rampaged through the Bataclan theater in Paris, killing everyone within reach, they were protesting France’s treatment of ISIS. When they rape a woman at a music concert in Israel next to the bodies of her murdered friends, they’re protesting for Gaza.

In August of 2015, the New York Times posted an article titled “Isis Enshrines A Theology of Rape.” It was subtitled “Claiming the Quaran’s support, the Islamic state codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool.”

This is an excerpt from the article:

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her, it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I kept telling him it hurts, please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.

The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

The religion of Islam in the minds of extremists doesn’t only justify their actions; it requires it. Stop believing the excuses and feigning understanding of them. Face up to the fact that these groups are marauding murderers. No one is responsible for the terrorism associated with Islam, only Islam is responsible for the terror.

Islam in this form cannot be reasoned or co-existed with. Its violence is a religious duty written into its scripture and its laws. Its atrocities, murder, torture, mutilation and rape are all acts of sacred religious devotion. The Islamic kingdom of heaven can only be achieved when the entire world submits to Islam.

This is the mindset of the Jihad. They are constantly at war with everyone. There will be no peace without total surrender. This is not about politics, Israel, the United States or anything else. It’s a thousand plus year crusade to subjugate all of mankind.

We need to stop buying into their lies. We need to stop blaming ourselves and others and we need to understand that, like cancer, there will be no cure until the disease is removed.