Conversation About Islam Conversations

I was talking to a friend about Islam, and I could tell he was thinking that I talk about Islam too much, so I said, "The reason I am so fascinated with talking about Islam is first, it's really relevant these days."

He interrupted me and said, "Yeah, I get that. It's definitely relevant."

"And," I continued, "the resistance people give me intrigues me. I've been an avid reader all my life. Only non-fiction. I don't even like reading fiction. I like learning stuff, and I enjoy sharing what I'm learning."

He nodded. To people who know me, this is probably one of the most obvious things about me.

"And all my life the reaction I've gotten from all the different things I've learned and shared has been almost entirely interest. Fascination even. Very rarely has anyone ever shown any kind of resistance to what I say. But on the subject of Islam, I had people arguing with me — people who didn't know anything at all about Islam. They would say, 'Christians do bad things too' — as if that has anything to do with anything!"

He laughed.

"I mean, I wasn't trying to justify Christianity by saying that about Islam!" He knows that I'm not a Christian, so he found this amusing. "But people say, 'the Crusades were bad too and not all Muslims are terrorists and the majority of Muslims are peace-loving people, and besides, what are you suggesting? That we go to war with 1.6 billion people?!'"

He smiled and said, "I think I said all of those to you!" He and I have had many conversations about Islam, and he has slowly started to wonder if Islam might be a bigger problem than he originally thought.

And I said, "I think there are a lot of reasons people respond this way. Of course it's scary. They don't want it to be true. And there are other things. It seems like picking on a minority. It seems like implying that we shouldn't have freedom of religion. It sort of seems like racism, but that's not right, of course, because Islam isn't a race. I think people just don't know how to deal with the information. And that has really intrigued me."

As it happened, the guy I was talking to is the one who recommended the book "Night" (which I've written about here). So I said, "That's what captured me so much about the book by Elie Wiesel — that old man that came back to the little town and tried to tell people what happened, and not one person believed him! That's so much like what has been happening about Islam. People didn't want to believe Islam's core doctrines are hateful and intolerant. They didn't want to believe that the founder of Islam owned slaves, raped women, tortured, assassinated and beheaded people, because the implications of such a terrible fact are too much. And besides, I know this Muslim and he's really nice — as if someone's niceness can tell you anything about a person's ideology. Ted Bundy was supposedly nice. Hitler was nice. Some lady just came out after all these years — she was his maid — and admitted that she thought Hitler was a really nice man!"

At this point, he seemed well won over, so I let the conversation drift into other topics.

The reason I share these conversations with you is because I think we all ought to be sharing our conversations with each other — especially when a conversation goes particularly well. I think it helps give us ideas about how to have these conversations so that they move the ball forward instead of those conversations that we've all had where we share information about Islam that seems like the ball moved backwards — like the person you're talking to is now even more against your point of view at the end of the conversation than the beginning. We need less of those, and more of the moving-the-ball-forward kind — even if it only moves the person just a little bit toward the ultimate acceptance of the painful and disturbing truth that Islam is at its heart intolerant, violent, misogynistic, and supremacist. Any given conversation doesn't have to bring someone all the way to that horrifying realization. But moving in that direction is good enough.

If you have a conversation like this, we want to hear it. You can post it on our web site: Talk About Islam Among Non-Muslims (and we read all the comments on that site) or you can email it directly to us here: Email CW. Let's help each other with these conversations.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here.

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Muhammad and the Genocide of the Jews

The following was written by F. W. Burleigh, author of the book, It's All About Muhammad, reprinted here with permission. Burleigh's biographical and historical information is based entirely on mainstream Islamic sources considered authoritative by Islamic scholars. 

If Muhammad were alive today, he would be put on trial for numerous crimes against humanity. One of the main charges against him would be genocide against the Jews of Arabia.

There are a number of incidents that make up the genocide accusation, but the chief among them was the beheading of anywhere from 400 to 900 Jewish men and boys, with 700 being the likely number of victims.

What pushed Muhammad to genocide was hatred. He hated the Jews because they rejected him and his religion, which was an amalgamation of Jewish and Christian and other religious beliefs. He claimed to be their prophet and insisted he was “commissioned” by Allah to restore the true faith of Abraham, but they laughed in his face. He was an Arab of Yemeni origin, not a Jew.

These crimes occurred in Yathrib, later known as Medina, and later extended outward to other Jewish communities. Yathrib, which at the time was half Jewish, became home to Muhammad after he fled Mecca, his town of birth. He barely escaped with his life after his compatriots decided they must kill him to keep him from destroying their way of life. His dramatic escape occurred in A.D. 622. At the time Yathrib was an agricultural valley with a population of 20,000. The Jews were distributed among three major tribes.

Muhammad thought the Jews would welcome him with open arms. He claimed to be a prophet of the line of Abraham, and in Mecca he had composed a number of Koran chapters having to do with the prophets, mostly of Biblical fame. He recited them to the Jewish rabbis of Yathrib as proof he was who he claimed to be. The Jews analyzed them and found his prophet stories were versions of derivative legends, not from the Bible, and so they rejected him.

While in Mecca, Muhammad had developed curse prayers — hate prayers — that he and his followers recited against the Meccans for rejecting him. He now turned his curses on the Jews. He branded them as apes and pigs and stirred up hatred against them in diatribes from the pulpit at his mosque. “They are mischief makers. They are fools. The Jews deny the truth,” he screamed on one occasion. (Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, p. 248)

He composed numerous Koran verses that seethed with the hatred he felt for the Jews for rejecting him. In verse after verse he warned them that hellfire awaited them for not believing in him. “Sufficient for the Jew is the Flaming Fire!” he said in Koran 4:55. In another he said, “There is a grievous punishment awaiting them. Satan tells them not to believe so they will end up in Hell.” (Koran 59:14)

When the Jews continued to resist him, Muhammad resorted to genocide. This began less than two years after he arrived in Yathrib. He and his growing corps of zealots attacked one of the Jewish tribes and after a two-week siege the Jews surrendered. Muhammad wanted to behead them all, but was talked out of it by one of the pagan allies of the Jews.

A year later, Muhammad forced the second of the three Jewish tribes to leave Yathrib, under penalty of death if they did not. He seized all of their wealth — fortresses, homes, date plantations, crop fields, and weapons — and distributed them among the elite of his followers from Mecca, but retained major properties for himself.

From his base in Yathrib, he was in constant conflict with the Meccans. He attacked their caravans, provoking an armed resistance. Muhammad and the Meccans fought two important battles, at Badr (A.D. 624) and Uhud (A.D. 625). A third came about two years after Uhud when the Meccans attacked Yathrib with a force of 12,000 men, but were stopped by a deep and lengthy trench Muhammad dug around the vulnerable areas of the valley. The last remaining Jewish tribe, the Qurayzas, whose territory was in the southeast corner of the sprawling valley, at first tried to remain neutral, then sided with the invaders, then changed their mind.

This misstep gave Muhammad the pretext to attack them. After the Meccan army left, Muhammad’s forces laid siege to the Qurayza fortress. Three weeks later the Jews gave up and begged Muhammad to allow them to leave. But he had been itching to mass murder the Jews for a long time. All of the men and adolescent boys, very likely about 700 in all, were force-marched to the interior of the valley to a compound near Muhammad’s mosque. The next day, he had a deep trench dug in the marketplace near the mosque. The Jews were led out of the compound five or six at a time. At the edge of the trench, they were forced to their knees and their heads were cut off. The heads and the torsos were thrown into the ditch.

Two of Muhammad’s first cousins, Ali, who later conquered Persia, and Zubayr, who died decades later owning $3 billion in gold alone (in today's dollars), did most of the beheading. At a rate of one victim per minute, it would have taken them almost 12 hours to kill that many people. Following the massacre, he enslaved all of the women and children, about 1,000 in all. He broke them up into five lots of 200 each. He kept two hundred for himself and sold two lots to two of the wealthiest of his Meccan followers. The rest he sent to slave markets in Syria where they were sold and the profits used to buy weapons and horses.

Violence is Muhammad’s legacy to the world. It is his Sunna, the example of his behavior in furtherance of “Allah’s cause,” which in effect means in furtherance of his cause of control, domination, and subjugation to impose his idea of God.

His idea of God was a reflection of who he was: hate-filled, vengeful, and without mercy toward people who rejected him.

His legacy continues today.

F. W. Burleigh is the author of It’s All About Muhammad: A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet. He blogs at www.itsallaboutmuhammad.com.

This article has also been posted on Inquiry Into Islam here.

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What's the Game Plan?

What are we doing on Citizen Warrior? What are we aiming for? It's a good idea to revisit this question from time to time.

Our main focus is on helping you, the reader, educate people you know about the problem of Islam.

The outcome we're aiming at is a population that is no longer fooled by the nonsense about Islam communicated in the media and by politicians.

This better-educated population will create a growing base of support for news outlets and politicians who speak honestly about Islamic doctrine. As Robert Spencer points out, right now "it is political suicide to speak honestly about Islam." We intend to create a condition where it is not political suicide. Once that happens, people everywhere will be emboldened to speak honestly about Islam in public.

Until enough people understand some basics about Islam, the public solutions supported by the general population will be ineffective.

This work is almost entirely one-on-one. The bulk of this education must happen between you and people you know. When the number of enlightened people reaches a critical point, the general awareness will expand rapidly as the media and politicians gain the courage (because of sufficient support) to educate the rest of the population.

That's the plan. The first step is to reach the people in your life who don't yet get it.

We post two kinds of articles on Citizen Warrior: Those you can share directly with people, and those that will help you more effectively (and more enjoyably) educate people about Islam's prime directive in your conversations with them.

For many of the posts to share directly, we will also post them on a more share-friendly site of ours called Inquiry Into Islam. Please subscribe to that blog and share those posts as they get published.

And we have many resources available to you already: Tools to Help You Educate Your Fellow Non-Muslims About Islam, most of which have been published in a manual.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here. 

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What Does Charm Tell You About Someone's Beliefs?

Have you ever met a politician in person? I have met many, and their level of charm is impressive. They are very likeable people in person. And it doesn't matter what side of the aisle they're on. They are equally charming. Their smiles are warm. Their handshakes are friendly. They look you in the eye and call you by name. They appear to be very interested in you. It's like they all went to the same charm school.

Maybe they've all read How to Win Friends and Influence People and applied everything in the book. Or maybe anybody who is paying attention could learn how to establish a friendly connection with others on their own.

But the point here is that liberal, conservative, or independent, someone's degree of niceness doesn't tell you what they believe or what they intend to do.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that many people will respond to your criticism of Islam with, "But I know several Muslims, and they are very nice people," as if the existence of nice Muslims means that Islamic doctrine couldn't possibly command intolerance or violence against non-Muslims. But that's ridiculous. Niceness and charm tell you nothing at all about the ideology someone subscribes to.

Make this point in your conversations, and make it clearly. Let's get this objection out of the way and get back to a real conversation about Islam.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here. 

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Do Some People Seem Impossible to Reach?

Below are two comments by Tallulah, posted on the article, A Manual For Citizen Warriors. Although they're a great sales pitch for our book (Getting Through) I post them here for the intelligent and useful commentary about something crucial in the counterjihad movement — how well we are able to reach those people who still hold out hope that Islam is a religion of peace (people who should be our allies but who are inadvertently helping Islam's advance).

Here is the first comment by Tallulah:

I finished the book a couple of days ago, and like others here will read it more than once. It's so thoughtful, insightful, and psychologically intelligent.

I've been unhappy with the way so many people approach skeptics and lefties in comment sections when it comes to Islam. Getting through to people is so crucial to the future of our liberty, lives, happiness, and sanity, and I see too many people keep throwing away opportunities to plant growable seeds *because they indulge themselves in emotional venting*.

I also object to the way people assume that it's hopeless to get through to certain people, instead of assuming that perhaps if they patiently plant a seed, even in politically correct soil, that it may grow later if planted in a thoughtful way. Sometimes I get the impression that a given counter jihadist is just so angry that venting has become more important than winning the war.

While I'm sure these people are serious about the threats we face, they don't seem to have thought about how the opposition thinks and how to get around the barrier. And getting around it is the only way. Any attempt to bash through it will only make the target harden his defenses.

That's why I was so thrilled with this gem of a book. I'm recommending it at Jihad Watch and every appropriate place.

If I think of any good suggestions to include in the next edition, I'll let you know. But at the moment I'm just so happy with it as it is! :)

Thank you, Citizen Warrior, for all your hard work for the counter jihad, and for the wisdom of your approach.


A few days later, Tallulah added this comment:

I've thought of a suggestion for the next edition! Actually, I don't remember whether the present edition touched on this or not. I think perhaps it did. But here's an approach I've been using that seems to open some people right up to what I have to say.

A while back I realized that a great way to understand how Muslims relate to their religion — to see the varied ways that real, actual Muslims see Islam — would be to read lots and lots of testimonies and watch videos by *former* Muslims. I figured that former Muslims would be more likely to tell things as they really see them without fudging anything. So I started on that project and it's been a very productive project for me.

One benefit has been that by telling some of the personal stories I've read and listened to I really personalize the issues *and* Muslims for people — because among the former Muslims are people who run the gamut from former lax Muslims to people who for a time even supported the Islamic State. Using real-life examples of former Muslims' experiences, what they used to believe, what they believe now, and what they have to go through before and after coming out of the apostate closet is quite gripping. A person who can tell these stories and shows sympathy for these people cannot be a bigot, because you have to see that the same ex-Muslim that you're supporting with sympathy now was once a Muslim whose *ideology* you're presently warning against. But it's the same human being.

It's a human being who has gone through a long process of experience and thought down a long and difficult road that many other Muslims are traveling every day. (And other Muslims are not.)

The best way to gain understanding of any subject is to explain principles/ideology with real-life examples. Former Muslims make those examples profoundly personal and real. Gather stories to tell. Turn people on to investigating Muslim apostates for themselves. If you can't convince someone to read the Koran, one of these apostates just might be able to do it for you.

The book Tallulah is talking about is: Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam. You can also learn more (and contribute ideas) at the website: Talk About Islam Among Non-Muslims.

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