scoreboard:

"I wonder how come Robert never tells us which translation of the Qur'an he uses for these quotes... "

Liar!

They are always from here:

http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/engagemen...

A Muslim site.

This particular version of 4:34 is Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall's.

Pickthall was a Muslim also.

Why not just tell the truth?

Cordially
Robert Spencer

mp11

"Given that you praise and support these authors it does raise the question of how your views of Islam and muslim coincide with those of Hugh, Raymond etc."

Given that I have explicitly and repeatedly (do a search) explained that I do not believe that all Muslims are working in lockstep on the jihad, one would think this question has already been answered.

And that's leaving aside your tendentious and inaccurate characterization of the views of Hugh and Raymond.

If you are not a Leftist or a jihadist, you certainly reason like one.

Cordially
Robert Spencer

mp11

On what basis do you assume that for someone to work with someone else they have to agree on everything 100%?

Please do not project your totalitarian Leftist/jihadist mindset onto free people.

Cordially
Robert Spencer

mp11:

If you'll pardon me, that is a bit flat-footed and literalistic of you. I was speaking of a tendency, not claiming that this was absolutely the first time this had ever happened. That's why I wrote of a "near-universal" tendency. "Near" universal.

Your prosecution would be more successful if it were a bit more supple-minded.

Cordially
Robert Spencer

mp11

You say: "All we have here is crime and a nationality (liberian) and in the deranged P. Geller world it becomes a Muslim crime committed by people who are automatically assumed to be Muslims and their act based on Shariah. I didnt even know Liberia was a Muslim country."

Do some research. Liberia is 20% Muslim.

Also, Pamela Geller did not say the family was Muslim. She said their behavior was in accord with Sharia norms, and it is.

Your use of the smear term "deranged" for a courageous activist who is one of the few people speaking up for the plight of women in Islamic countries, and your casual treatment of the facts indicates that you yourself are the one doing the axe-grinding here, not anyone else. Take your defamation and distortions back to LGF, please.

Cordially
Robert Spencer

Abdullah Mikail

Lying again, eh?

I didn't make the Darth Spencer pic. It was made by the Islamic Thinkers Society. Immature? Take it up with your jihadist coreligionists.

Cordially
Robert Spencer

On March 3, 2006, twenty-two-year-old Iranian student Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar drove an SUV into a crowd of students on the Carolina campus, injuring nine. In a letter written soon afterward, Taheri-azar declared that “in the Koran, Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women.” In another letter he asserted,

I live with the holy Koran as my constitution for right and wrong and definition of justice. . . . Allah gives permission in the Koran for the followers of Allah to attack those who have raged [sic] war against them, with the expectation of eternal paradise in case of martyrdom and/or living one’s life in obedience of all of Allah’s commandments found throughout the Koran’s 114 chapters. I’ve read all 114 chapters approximately 15 times since June of 2003 when I started reading the Koran. . . . I live only to serve Allah, by obeying all of Allah’s commandments of which I am aware by reading and learning the contents of the Koran.

Later he sent a detailed exposition of the Koran’s teachings on warfare to the Carolina campus newspaper. The campus chapter of the Muslim Students Association disavowed Taheri-azar’s interpretation of the Koran, but did not offer an alternative understanding of the verses he cited.

Overall, it is extremely rare – if not impossible – to find a jihadist who does not cite the Koran to justify his actions. Britain-based jihadist preacher, Abu Yahya, asserts simply, “It says in the Koran that we must try as much as we can to terrorise the enemy.” And Pakistani jihad leader Beitullah Mehsud claims that “Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfill God’s orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the world.” He specified that his jihad – struggle in Arabic – was an offensive military operation: “We will continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out. Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jazia.” The “jazia,” or jizya, is a tax that the Koran (9:29) specifies must be levied on Jews, Christians, and some other non-Muslim faiths as a sign of their subjugation under the Islamic social order.

One pro-Osama website put it this way: “The truth is that a Muslim who reads the Koran with devotion is determined to reach the battlefield in order to attain the reality of Jihad. It is solely for this reason that the Kufaar [unbelievers] conspire to keep the Muslims far away from understanding the Koran, knowing that Muslims who understand the Koran will not distance themselves from Jihad.”

Do these things have nothing to do with Islam?

Cordially
Robert Spencer

message continued

In March 2009, five Muslims accused of helping plot the September 11 attacks, including the notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, wrote an “Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations.” In it they quote the Koran to justify their jihad war against the American Infidels. “In God’s book,” asserts the letter, “he ordered us to fight you everywhere we find you, even if you were inside the holiest of all holy cities, The Mosque in Mecca, and the holy city of Mecca, and even during sacred months. In God’s book, verse 9 [actually verse 5], Al-Tawbah [the Koran’s 9th chapter]: Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush.”

“Therefore, killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion. These actions are our offerings to God. In addition, it is the imposed reality on Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, in the land of the two holy sites [Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia], and in the rest of the world, where Muslims are suffering from your brutality, terrorism, killing of the innocent, and occupying their lands and their holy sites. Nevertheless, it would have been the greatest religious duty to fight you over your infidelity. However, today, we fight you over defending Muslims, their land, their holy sites,and their religion as a whole.”

The idea that the Koran commands Muslims to do violence to unbelievers runs from the very top of the international jihadist movement – Osama bin Laden – down to the rank and file. In January 2004, Reem Raiyishi, a Gazan mother of two children aged one and three, blew herself up at an Israeli checkpoint, murdering four Israelis. Before she did that, she posed for pictures holding a rifle in one hand and the Koran in the other. In a videotaped recording she declared, “It was always my wish to turn my body into deadly shrapnel against the Zionists and to knock on the doors of heaven with the skulls of Zionists.”

Apparently as far as she was concerned nothing she read in the Koran dissuaded her from pursuing that wish.

Nor was Raiyishi by any means the only jihad terrorist, or even the only suicide bomber, to invoke the Koran as justification for violence against non-Muslims. In January 2006, a gang of Muslims in Paris kidnapped Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jew, who was tortured, mutilated, and ultimately murdered. During Halimi’s weeks-long ordeal, his captors called his family, demanding half a million euros in ransom money and reciting verses of the Koran. (see next message)

mp11:

You say: "Having said that, I found this little tidbit you wrote: 'I agree 100% that "our fight is against Islam, which is not ethnic in nature.' http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023306.php Which indicates that you are fighting Islam and you view it (the religion) as the enemy. Do you really wonder why the ALA is worried about inviting you?"

Interesting that you have to go to a hastily written and offhand blog comment, rather than to anything in 8 books or hundreds of articles, to find something that seemed to make your case. I have written many times that if Muslims renounce violent (and stealth) jihad against non-Muslims and Islamic supremacism, fully and sincerely, I would be glad to work with them. Why are those statements nullified by this blog comment? Because you want them to be, in order to fit me into the box you have constructed for me.

In reality, what I meant by the blog comment, and what the ALA should be worried about rather than about me, was things like this (see next message):

proxywar:

"Which begs the question: Is this merely obfustication by you inorder to conceal your true beliefs? The reason I ask is because I like you and enjoy your work on islam but I might start to think twice about using you as a source if any of this is true."

In the first place, I have nothing to do with the Sweden Democrats whatsoever. I was once in the same room with some of them. That's all. Then people like you and Johnson have taken that fact and made much more of it than was ever warranted.

In the second place, it is an odd bunch of neo-Nazis that wins awards from pro-Israel groups. A sober mind might start to think that things like this show up the lies on Wikipedia and LGF.

Third, do I secretly hold beliefs other than the ones I state and fight for? There is no way I can possibly answer a question like that in a satisfactory way, and I think you know that. But I do suggest to you that it would be odd to be spending all my time and energy fighting to defend principles (freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, equality of rights for all) if I don't hold those principles.

Cordially
Robert Spencer