The tragic terrorist bombing in Manchester, England this week reminds us that we cannot just combat radical Muslims, seeking to make our borders secure and fighting them overseas. We must also combat the ideology of radical Islam.

Homegrown Radicals

In 2005, after the horrific London train bombings, many Brits were shocked to learn that three of the four terrorists were born in England. The fourth, born in Jamaica, was raised in England from the age of 5.

These four men potentially had access to the best England had to offer. They were raised in an environment of religious freedom. Yet they ended up murdering children, women, and men in cold blood. And they did it in the name of Allah. Why?

We now know that the Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, was also born and raised in England after his parents fled to the UK from Gaddafi’s Libya. Abedi’s family was reportedly “devout and well-known to be against Isis and Islamism. Abedi’s father, known as Abu Ismael, was described in glowing terms at the Didsbury Mosque where he and the family worshipped.”

According to a family friend, Abedi’s father used to lead early morning prayer calls. “And his boys learned the Qur’an by heart.”

But, according to this friend, the father, Abu Ismael, “will be terribly distraught. He was always very confrontational with jihadi ideology, and this Isis thing isn’t even jihad, it’s criminality. The family will be devastated.”

If this report is accurate, these were devout Muslims who repudiated violent Islamic theology. How, then, did the son come to embrace it? Or was his embrace of radical Islam the direct result of him memorizing the Quran as a child?

We Have to Verbally Identify ‘Radical Islam’

There are some who argue that there is no such thing as radical Islam, only Islam. Islam itself is evil and, by nature, a violent religion. Others argue that violent Islam is not Islam at all, and that Islam, by nature, is a peaceful religion.

My position has been that both the peaceful and violent expressions of the faith can be found within Islam. That’s why I use the qualifying term “radical Islam.”

Let’s put that debate aside for a moment. We can all agree that there is a barbaric and violent ideology that justifies its actions using Islamic texts, traditions, and history. That is the ideology commonly called “radical Islam.” That ideology that must be combated.

The Obama administration argued that this terrorist ideology had nothing to do with Islam. He said to associate it with Islam was to offend the Muslim world. But that strategy was doomed to fail.

First, it paralyzed intelligence and law enforcement agencies, since they had to purge any references to “Islam” from their manuals. How can you combat something you cannot name?

Second, since we were not allowed to identify radical Islam, we could not identity its roots and its appeal. How could we stop people from being radicalized by Islam if Islam (in any form) is not the problem?

For eight years our government avoided offending the Muslim world by refusing to say “Islamic terrorism.” How did that strategy pay off in terms of intelligence dividends? Did Muslims across America come forward in large numbers to help uproot radical Islamic terrorism? Not to my knowledge.

Questions to Ask

What we need to do now is what we should have been doing all along.

We need to ask who is getting radicalized. We need to ask how they are getting radicalized.

What ideology appeals to them? What type of individual is likely to get recruited? Why do they hate us so deeply?

Let us profile in the best sense of the word, the way Israeli airline security profiles passengers and the way behavioral analysis units profile criminals. (Think Criminal Minds.)

But the goal is not to profile Muslims. The goal is to profile people who are likely to be radicalized. If 99 percent of them are Muslims, then that is part of the profile. How do we identify that small percentage of the Muslim population likely to be recruited for terror? Peace-loving Muslims should lead the way in helping expose and uproot these dangerous weeds growing in their midst.

We need to ask who is doing the recruiting and how they are succeeding. Which leaders or groups are doing the work? How are they doing it? To what extent is it happening in mosques or Islamic centers or prisons or online?

Muslim Leaders Must Condemn All Terror

And we need to call on Muslim leaders across the world to denounce Islamic terror and to combat it, without caveat or qualification. That means that if a Muslim suicide bomber blows up people in Israel or England or France, the action must be condemned unequivocally.

Islamic theologians and political leaders must unite and say, “That is not Islam, and that is a hell-bound murderer, not a martyr.”

While some Muslim leaders have done this with consistency (although, more rarely when it comes to attacks against Israelis), all too many others have not.

In his book 111 Questions on Islam, Samir Kahlil Samir pointed to “the final document released at the end of the summit held in Beirut in January 2002, in which more than two hundred Sunni and Shiite ᷾ulemā’ [Islamic scholars], coming from thirty-five countries, participated.” They were discussing suicide attacks in Israel and whether those could be justified in the name of Islam, which otherwise opposes suicide.

The document stated this: “The actions of martyrdom of the mujāhidīn are legitimate and have their foundation in the Qur’ān and in the prophet’s tradition. They represent the most sublime of martyrdoms because the mujāhidīn accomplish them in full conscience and freedom of choice.”

This is heinous and despicable, yet it was the verdict of a wide range of multi-national Islamic scholars.

In 2001, another prominent Muslim leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi of Egypt, claimed that “nobody can declare that it is unlawful to fight with all means against the [Israeli] occupation.” He wrote that “jihād on the way to God and in the defense of the country, of homeland, and of sacred things is today an obligation for all Muslims more than in any other period in the past.” And this did not only apply in “Palestine.” It also applied “in Kashmir, and in other hot spots in the world.”

Mainstream Muslims, We Need You

Only Muslim leaders can end this debate. If Islam is not, by nature, a violent religion, then the top Muslim voices across the world must denounce it and combat it. And they must help the West combat it. Is this too much to ask?

When a demented Christian kills an abortion doctor, Christian leaders immediately denounce the act, calling it murder. We disassociate ourselves from the crime. We rightly state that it is has no basis in our faith. We re-affirm that we are pro-life (not pro-murder). That’s why these violent “Christian” acts are so few and far between, despite our passionate stand against abortion.

And what if, God forbid, there was a wave of violent attacks in the name of Jesus and the New Testament? We would speak out all the more and do our best to expose the false, murderous, unbiblical ideology. “This has nothing to do with Jesus!”

Why shouldn’t Muslims do this around the world when it comes to their faith? And why shouldn’t they join forces with non-Islamic governments to combat Islamic terror? (This is what President Donald Trump called for in his speech in Riyadh.)

If, in fact, real Islam is violent Islam, then it is Islam we must combat. If, to the contrary, radical Islam is a deviant form of Islam, then mainstream Muslims must work with us to uproot it.

Either way, the time for pussyfooting around the obvious is over. The blood of slaughtered British children is crying out from the ground. (For more from the author of “Why We Must Name, Identify, and Combat the Ideology of Radical Islam” please click HERE)

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Every day, in little ways and big, each of us faces the choice: Between illusion and truth. Comfort and courage. Between getting patted on the back or looking yourself in the mirror.

The French have made their choice. Confronted with monthly terror attacks, large sections of major cities “no-go” zones for police and women not wearing hijabs, and agents of ISIS infiltrating “refugee” groups, the voters of France overwhelmingly chose … surrender.

They rejected an imperfect candidate, Marine Le Pen, with a plausible and moral plan for containing the cancer of radical Islam. Instead, they picked Emmanuel Macron, an off-the-shelf crony socialist who favors open borders and denies that “French culture” exists.

That nation’s largest Catholic newspaper, La Croix, endorsed Macron, and the head of the French church welcomed his election. Meanwhile, Catholics in Iraq and jihadist-occupied Syria face burned and blackened churches, and life in refugee camps.

Just Cowards and Fools?

What’s the difference between Islam as seen by French Catholics, and by Iraqi ones? Are Christians who believe that Islam is a “religion of peace” simply … cowards and fools?

It’s a tempting conclusion. It easy to think the same of Western liberals who defend “Marxist theory” while squirming at Communist crimes. Indeed, Communists themselves used to call such people “useful idiots.” Both timidity and stupidity surely play their part.

But even those evils need something to work with. In the case of Communism, Westerners who sneered at “primitive anti-Communism” would insist that the “idealistic” Karl Marx was betrayed by Communist movements. Blood-soaked rulers like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or even Lenin. … They were never real Marxists at all.

Yes, every single time Marxism has ever been tried in the real world the results are the same: Famine, tyranny and slaughter. But that doesn’t disprove the theory. Go back and read the early writings of Marx, when he sounded like a liberal. Look at the vaporous utopia he promises. Why, it doesn’t even have a State! That “withers away” at some point, right about the time that everyone willingly gives up his private property. Then he works hard every day just for the common good. Then the chorus of “Kumbaya” breaks out from grateful billions. And everybody’s happy. No need for secret police, gulags or psychiatric prisons. Or even for “opiates” like Jesus.

That’s the real Marxism. You know, the one Marx daydreamed about before he even led a movement. Which only ever existed inside his head. The version millions lived through, out in the grubby world of actual people and places, which tyrannized half the planet. … That was the illusion. Okay? Have you got that, students? It will be on your final exam.

Doublethink on Islam

The same kind of doublethink prevails concerning Islam, and it’s equally hard to fathom. Apart, that is, from cynical explanations like faint-heartedness and folly.

But we do know what materials this self-delusion works with. That comes courtesy of a prominent Jesuit Catholic priest, Father Henri Boulad. Unlike the bishops of France, Fr. Boulad has lived for decades in a majority-Muslim country, Egypt. In fact, he was the leader of all the Jesuit priests in Egypt.

According to Agenda Europe, Fr. Boulad has responded to the elections in France and the rise of Islam in Europe … by seeking citizenship in Hungary. That country’s conservative president Viktor Orbán, has refused to accept Muslim refugees — to the loud condemnation of leaders in the EU and the Church. As Agenda Europe reports:

With accepting Hungarian citizenship, he wanted to “signal that the country has made the right decision on the issue of the migration crisis that threatens the existence of Europe,” said Boulad. “I would like to (…) fight for the future and for the Christian values on the side of Hungary and Viktor Orbán.”

Cherry-Picking the Quran

Boulad explained in his comments the source of Western self-deceptions over Islam, especially in Catholic circles. Essentially, those who wish to think the best of Islam, whose fear of “xenophobia” overpowers their rational faculties, have plenty of material to work with. They can draw on the part of the Quran that Muhammad supposedly received while he lived in Mecca. At that point, he was still a marginal, little-heeded mystical preacher, surrounded by pagans. And his message was one of tolerance, and peaceful coexistence among Muslims, Christians and Jews.

It was only later, once he ruled the nearby city of Medina as an absolute monarch, that Muhammad starting hearing very different messages. Now they told him to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them.” Now the messages began to include harsh condemnations of non-Muslims. They called for Islamic wars of conquest. Now Paradise was the reward for those who died in the course of jihad, while those who lived could keep the goods and the women whom they captured. Yes, plunder and sex slaves. As ISIS points out: It’s right there in the Quran.

Much more appears in the Hadith, dubious collections of supposed verbal traditions going back to Muhammad, which Arab scholars compiled centuries later. These filled in all the details of law, government and social control that were missing from the Quran — an infuriatingly vague and hard-to-understand document, whose first written versions only appeared long after Muhammad’s death. For useful, approachable books on the murky origins of Islam, see Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of the Sword, or the more provocative Did Muhammad Exist? by Robert Spencer.

We Are All Sufis Now

Wherever Islam really came from, or whatever happy visions danced in the Prophet’s head while he was still powerless, we know what happened next. Likewise, we know what came of Karl Marx’s youthful social justice fantasies. But if you want to avoid conflict, or seem more sophisticated than the “bigots” or “Bourgeois” around you, you can latch onto the early stuff. That is a religion of peace, just as Marx’s early scribblings talked a lot about “freedom.”

This cherry-picking is what most Christian clergy seem to be doing, Fr. Boulad warned. Except, of course, for Christians in Muslim nations, who oddly have a very different view of Islam. You know, the way the Polish Karol Wotyjla (later Pope John Paul II) had a different take on Marxism than lefty priests living in Paris.

In fact, Fr. Boulad even traces the etymology of Christian self-delusion over Islam. Boulad cites as the main source of Catholic Islamophilia,

French Islamologist Louis Massignon (1883-1962), for whom mystical Sufism had meant the essence of Islam. Islam, however, historically chose not the “Meccan,” but the “Medinian,” path that still determines it: “The suras of the Koran that threaten so-called unbelievers with violence and jihad, are from the Medina period, while the more tolerant, mystic suras stem from the Mecca period. Rome does not understand this, and the Christians of the East, who know Islam from the inside, are not asked, they are put to the side” [Boulad said].

Peaceful Muslims living in Western countries probably do the same thing in their heads that Massignon did. They focus on the early stuff, and shrug off its ugly sequels. We should be grateful for that. But the more time their kids spend in Saudi-funded mosques, or on the Internet, the more likely they are to find out the truth about Islam, at least as it’s preached by all its major religious authorities, in every Muslim country. Just like Marxism, by its fruits we shall know it. (For more from the author of “Are Western Apologists for Islam Today’s ‘Useful Idiots’?” please click HERE)

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Last October, prodded by a petition asking that it recognize “that extremist individuals do not represent the religion of Islam” and condemn “all forms of Islamophobia,” the Canadian House of Commons agreed on a statement repudiating Islamophobia. Samer Majzoub, president of the Canadian Muslim Forum, then demanded that the government deal with the “Islamophobia” endemic to Canadian society. That demand is now under consideration.

Which caused me to wonder. What is Islamophobia? Might I, as a critic of Islam who nevertheless seeks to be kind to individual Muslims, suffer from this malady?

Phobias are inordinate fears — of heights, dogs, snakes, enclosed spaces and so on. The term “Islamophobia” implies that if you are afraid of Islam per se (rather than just “extremist individuals”), you are likely to be unjust or unkind, or perhaps launch wars against innocent Muslims.

Thus the Canadian petition went on to note (echoing the constant drumbeat in some American high school textbooks), that the Golden Age of Islam produced a series of literate, advanced empires with the Muslim faith at their ideological core. It claims that Islam then made contributions in “arts, culture, science, literature, medicine” and more.

To what extent Islam produced rather than obtaining these things through its conquests is hard to say. That is just one of the many ways in which Islam is more complicated than the Islamophobia-phobic let on. In fact, I think it is rational, moral and biblical to be wary of Islam as a whole, not just a few “extremists” within it — while offering kindness to individual Muslims.

Responses to Real Danger

Most phobias are exaggerated responses to real dangers, after all. Heights are dangerous, unless you’re Spider-Man. Bees sting. Snakes bite. Ask a coal miner or parakeet what can happen in an enclosed space. God implanted such fears in us to keep us in one piece.

So why then is “Islamophobia” a word, and not “Buddhaphobia?”

Ask a Coptic Christian in Egypt whose faith has been suppressed for more than a millennia. Ask Nigerian Christian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. Ask a survivor, if you can find one, of the once great and ancient Jewish communities in Egypt, Iraq or Iran. Talk to Yazidi girls sold into sexual slavery in ISIS-controlled territory.

A young Saudi woman I got to know in Oxford told me, “The only way I’m going back to Saudi is in a body bag.” A former imam I met in the same city told me that “of course” Islamic law prescribes death for those who convert out, which is why (after miraculously converting to Christ) he could not go home.

The villains in some of these cases are considered “extremist,” in others, they represent mainstream Islam. But “extremist” is one of those chameleon-words like “fundamentalist,” that derives meaning only from its neighbors. Therefore “extremist Muslims” must by definition be outliers and cannot “represent” Islam. The question that immediately leads to then, is, What does define Islam?

Defining Islam

Like any ideology, Islam can be defined by (a) the life and teachings of its founder; (b) its canonical writings; or (c) its developed traditions.

Western liberals tend to accentuate its traditions (c) rather than (a) or (b). But even viewed “liberally” as a mere social phenomenon, Islam provides rational grounds for worry, even fear. The horror of 9/11 was no aberration. “The borders of Islam are bloody,” said historian Bernard Lewis. And modern Islamic societies, as shown by broad-based United Nations research, tend to suppress women, among other ills.

Things turn even darker when we look at Islam’s founder. Among Mohammed’s crimes, as chronicled in Muslim tradition, are child-rape, polygamy, torture, slave-trading, assassination, mass-murder, armed robbery and the waging of many aggressive wars.

As for its canonical writings, much of what the enlightened world decries in modern Islam’s treatment of women has its origins in the teachings and actions of the prophet. These include marrying children to old men, polygamy, wife-beating, keeping women indoors and covered. Some of this is enshrined within the sacred pages of the Koran — and stands in stark contrast to the example of Jesus.

One must still give credit where credit is due. Who cannot admire, for instance, a Libyan Muslim immigrant to the United States who takes in terminally-ill foster children? Since Jesus teaches us to recognize such “Good Samaritans,” we should also recognize whatever Muslims have accomplished in medicine, art and science.

That said, recall that Islam conquered several cradles of civilization — ancient Sumer, Persia, Egypt, Israel, and much of the Greek Byzantine Empire — and ruled over technologically-advanced Nestorian Christian and Jewish communities. Islam then conquered much of Christendom and India and enslaved millions of Africans and Slavs. While not as inherently vicious as Nazism, Communism, or Aztec religion, Islam thus proves itself an object of rational fear.

The Two “Extremes”

One should distinguish between phobias or inordinate fears and reasonable concerns. Jesus taught his followers that they would be persecuted for His sake. Was that fear-mongering? Jesus sometimes avoided angry mobs and warned against bullies and ideological predators (“wolves”). Life under Islamic rule taught many followers of Christ to take pragmatic steps to mitigate the dangers of Islamic theology. They did this even while placing ultimate trust in God, making friends in the Muslim community, and treating each individual with the dignity and compassion of Christ.

Thus it is rational to fear the influence of a man whose example and teachings have led to great harm — even if it includes some good.

Christians should place ultimate trust in God. We are called to love Muslims as well, some of whom may prove better men and women than ourselves.

Osama bin Laden was an “extremist” because he followed Mohammed too closely. And that example is the root of a rational fear of Islam in its normative state. Those who truly love their neighbors are “extreme” rather in their resemblance to Jesus, the normative state of Christianity, which overcomes, but does not simply ignore, rational dangers. (For more from the author of “Fear of Islam Is Rational. It’s Not Islamophobia.” please click HERE)

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