Introducing An Inquiry Into Islam

MOST SITES that write about Islam (and are written by non-Muslims) are offensive to a lot of people, and some of them are people we need to reach. If the only people we try to educate are people who already know what we know, of course, we're just singing to the choir and essentially wasting our time.

We need ways to reach people who feel an aversion to anything that smacks of bigotry. That's why I want to turn everyone onto the web site, An Inquiry Into Islam. The purpose of the site is to provide us — people who already know about the terrifying brilliance of Islam — material to share with people who don't know much about it.

I copied several of the best articles from Citizen Warrior to the new site, but then I assiduously edited them for a new audience: For someone who is deeply skeptical of any criticism of Islam, for someone who thinks it is racism or bigotry to criticize Islam, for someone who wants the straight story but is skeptical of anyone who seems even the slightest bit "conservative."

The web site is set up with a very limited number of available articles, and that won't change. All the articles are at the top right of every page, so navigation is extremely easy. The sight looks bright, clean, and simple. It is as user-friendly as I could make it. I also made it as unbiased and neutral in its point of view as possible.

I invite you to poke around and send me suggestions on improving it. Do I say anything that has too rough an edge that might turn people away? Let's make this a tool we can use to help awaken the people in our lives to the incredibly surprising truth about orthodox, mainstream Islam. I hope you can find good uses for it.

Check it out: An Inquiry Into Islam.

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Creating a New Parallel Religion

IN A BIOGRAPHY of L. Ron Hubbard entitled, Bare-Faced Messiah, the author wrote, "On 25 July 1968, while Hubbard was still in Bizerte, the government in Britain finally decided to take action against Scientology. Kenneth Robinson, the Health Minister, stood up in the House of Commons and announced a ban on Scientology students entering the UK. 'The Government is satisfied,' he said, 'having reviewed all the available evidence, that Scientology is socially harmful. It alienates members of families from each other and attributes squalid and disgraceful motives to all who oppose it. Its authoritarian principles and practices are a potential menace to the personality and well-being of those so deluded as to become its followers; above all, its methods can be a serious danger to the health of those who submit to them.'"

When I read that, I was thinking to myself, "Why couldn't they investigate Islam and reject it as socially harmful, attributing disgraceful motives to all who oppose it, and its authoritarian practices a potential menace to its followers?

The answer is obvious: Because Islam is an "established" religion. It has been around awhile and has lots of followers. The British government could get away with banning incoming Scientology students because Scientology is new and has relatively few followers.

And this got me to thinking about something someone suggested to me awhile ago: What if we started a new religion? I don't mean sincerely starting a religion, but creating what looks like a real religion, but with the same basic principles as Islam, but with different names. A website could be created that looks like the central headquarters of the new religion, outlining all the tenets of the religion.

Then we could write and speak about this new religion without getting any flak at all. Europeans who find it increasingly difficult to criticize Islam could switch to criticizing the same things about this new religion. They couldn't get into trouble because there are no adherents to this new religion, so nobody would be offended. And nobody else cares if you criticize a new religion.

I think if you criticized an unknown or new religion — if you criticized the exact same teachings as Islam, but didn't call it Islam — it would help people see the teachings for what they are. It would get outside the cultural immune system that makes the whole subject of Islam taboo.

To give you an idea of what this might be like, someone has invented a religion to make fun of Scientology. The new religion is called "Tarvu." Check out their web site. Its purpose is different — it just makes fun of Scientology. But we could create a web site that seriously parallels the core principles of Islam, but without any reference whatsoever to Islam itself.

Let us know what you think of this idea. Email us or leave a comment.

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More on Using Scientology to Criticize Islam

I'M READING another biography of L. Ron Hubbard, this one entitled, Bare-Faced Messiah. I've mentioned before (in this article) that when you encounter resistance to your criticism of Islam, you can sidestep to talking about Scientology, which has many parallels with Islam. Nobody seems to mind when you criticize Scientology (except a Scientologist, of course).

You can criticize something about Scientology, and then say the same thing about Islam, and if someone gives you a bad time about it, you can ask, "Why is it okay to talk about Scientology but not Islam?"

It is no more racist to talk about Islam than Scientology, for example. And you can make that point very effectively and very reasonably, and thereby greatly reduce the flak you take for doing something everyone in free nations should be engaged in: Religious and political criticism and free discussion. What's the point of free speech if we aren't exercising it?

Anyway, below are eight excerpts from Bare-Faced Messiah. As you read, I'd like you to consider what a conversation might be like if you said, "I was reading something about Scientology today that really surprised me." Then talk about it for a bit. And then say, "It reminded me of something very similar about Islam." And talk about that for a bit. This is received with less resistance than talking about Islam only. Give it a try and you'll see what I mean.

Here are the eight excerpts from the book:

1. While Hubbard (L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology) was skirmishing with the FBI, he was also tightening his grip on the Scientology movement and urging his followers to take action against anyone attempting to practise Scientology outside the control of the 'church'. He derided apostates as 'squirrels' and recommended merciless litigation to drive them out of business. 'The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease,' he wrote in one of his interminable bulletins, casually adding, 'If possible, of course, ruin him utterly.'

In the same bulletin he offered the benefit of his advice to any Scientologists unlucky enough to be arrested. They were to instantly file a $100,000 civil damages suit for molestation of 'a Man of God going about his business', then go on the offensive 'forcefully, artfully, and arduously' and cause 'blue flames to dance on the courthouse roof until everybody has apologized profusely'. The only way to defend anything, Hubbard wrote, was to attack. 'If you ever forget that, you will lose every battle you are ever engaged in.' It was a philosophy to which he would adhere ardently all his life...

2. The same month as the Freedom Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency opened a file, No. 156409, on L. Ron Hubbard and his organization. CIA agents trawled through police, revenue, credit and property records to try and unravel Hubbard's tangled corporate affairs. It was a task of herculean difficulty, for the Church of Scientology was a cryptic maze of ad hoc corporations. The printed notepaper of the Academy of Scientology gave only a hint of its labyrinthine structure — on the left-hand side of the page was a list of no less than seventeen associated organizations, ranging from the American Society for Disaster Relief to the Society of Consulting Ministers.

Agents traced a considerable amount of property owned either by Hubbard, his wife, son, or one of the daunting number of 'churches' with which they were associated, but the report quickly became bogged down in a tangle of names and addresses: 'The Academy of Religious Arts and Sciences is currently engaged as a school for ministers of religion which at the present time possesses approximately thirty to forty students. The entire course consists of $1500 to $1800 worth of actual classroom studies...The public office is located at 1810-12 19th Street N.W. The corporations rent the entire building...

'The Hubbard Guidance Center, located at 2315 15th Street, N.W., occupies the entire building which consists of three floors and which was purchased by the SUBJECT Organization. The center also rents farm property located somewhere along Colesville Road in Silver Spring, Maryland, on a short-term lease. The center formerly operated a branch office at 8609 Flower Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland. In addition to the Silver Spring operation, the center has a working agreement with the Founding Church of Scientology of New York, which holds classes at Studio 847, Carnegie Hall, 154 West 57th Street, New York City. Churches of this denomination number in excess of one hundred in the United States...'

3. While he was still in Melbourne, Hubbard received an urgent telephone call from Washington with some bad news. Nibs (Hubbard's son), he was told, had 'blown'. To Scientologists, 'blowing the org' (leaving the church) was one of the worst crimes in the book: it was almost unbelievable that the highly-placed son and namesake of the founder would take such a step. Nibs had simultaneously held five posts in Scientology's increasingly cumbersome bureaucratic structure: he was Organizational Secretary of the Founding Church of Scientology, Washington, DC; Chief Advanced Clinical Course Instructor; Hubbard Communications Office World Wide Technical Director; and a Member of the International Council.

[Nibs] failed to take into account the fact that his father would automatically view his defection as an act of treachery...

4. Returning to a familiar theme, Hubbard urged his followers to defend Scientology by attacking its opponents: 'If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace...Don't ever defend, always attack. Don't ever do nothing. Unexpected attacks in the rear of the enemy's front ranks work best.'

5. 'It was not really possible to question what was going on,' explained David Mayo, a New Zealander and a long-time member of the Sea Org (the headquarters of Scientology worldwide, which was a small fleet of ships), 'because you were never sure who you could really trust. To question anything Hubbard did or said was an offense and you never knew if you would be reported. Most of the crew were afraid that if they expressed any disagreement with what was going on they would be kicked out of Scientology. That was something absolutely untenable to most people, something you never wanted to consider. That was much more terrifying than anything that might happen to you in the Sea Org.

'We tried not to think too hard about his behaviour. It was not rational much of the time, but to even consider such a thing was a discreditable thought and you couldn't allow yourself to have a discreditable thought. One of the questions in a sec-check (a security check, using a lie detector, which is done frequently throughout the organization) was, "Have you ever had any unkind thoughts about LRH?" and you could get into very serious trouble if you had. So you tried hard not to.'

6. Now sixty-two, Hubbard was also beginning to ponder his place in posterity. The Church of Scientology had been swift to make use of the recently enacted Freedom of Information Act, which had revealed that government agencies held a daunting amount of material about Scientology and its founder in their files, much of it less than flattering. Hubbard, who had never been fettered by convention or strict observance of the law, conceived a simple, but startlingly audacious, plan to improve his own image and that of his church for the benefit of future generations of Scientologists. All that needed to be done, he decided, was to infiltrate the agencies concerned, steal the relevant files and either destroy or launder any damaging information they contained. To a man who had founded both a church and a private navy this was a perfectly feasible scheme. The operation was given the code name Snow White — two words that would figure ever more prominently over the next few months in the communications between the Guardian's Office in Los Angeles and the Commodore's hiding place in Queens, New York.

7. At six o'clock on the morning of 8 July 1977, 134 FBI agents armed with search warrants and sledgehammers, simultaneously broke into the offices of the Church of Scientology in Washington and Los Angeles and carted away 48,149 documents. They would reveal an astonishing espionage system which spanned the United States and penetrated some of the highest offices in the land.

8. This is a quote from the government sentencing memorandum on Mary Sue Hubbard and the others, October 1978: "The crime committed by these defendants is of a breadth and scope previously unheard of. No building, office, desk or file was safe from their snooping and prying. No individual or organization was free from their despicable conspiratorial minds. The tools of their trade were miniature transmitters, lock picks, secret codes, forged credentials, and any other device they found necessary to carry out their conspiratorial schemes. It is interesting to note that the founder of their organization, unindicted co-conspirator L. Ron Hubbard, wrote in his dictionary entitled Modern Management Technology Defined that "Truth is what is true for you." Thus, with the founder's blessings, they could wantonly commit perjury as long as it was in the interests of Scientology."

All of this could be pulled straight out of the Muslim Brotherhood's playbook. Go on the offensive. Attack people who impede your goals. Use the courts to harass. Be merciless until people are apologizing profusely. Invoke "freedom of religion" as a cloak of protection. Create lots of different important-sounding organizations, and make the names seem mainstream and respectable, and try not to use your own religion's name in the title to throw people off your trail and to make it seem like a coalition of many religions. Create a "labyrinthine structure" of organizations to make it difficult for anyone to follow the money. Consider apostates as enemies to be destroyed. Criticism of the religion or the founder is completely forbidden, resulting in unthinking, uncritical (and therefore fanatical) followers. Scientologists use a lie detector. Islam uses Allah, who knows every thought you think and will judge you and punish you accordingly. Infiltrate government agencies in order to protect and promote the religion. And lying is allowed if it is done to further the goals of the religion.

Begin to talk about Scientology and Islam together and your conversations will be more interesting, less contentious, and more productive. With this new strategy, we should be able to reach more people in less time. Our goal is to educate non-Muslims, focusing on the undecided, because whoever is most organized will win.

Read about the Muslim Brotherhood's labyrinthine structure of their organizations.

Read about Scientology's "Fair Game" policy.

Read more about Scientology.

There's a biography of Hubbard that I think is the best book to read for an overview of Scientology. The book is called Messiah or Madman?

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What Should Be Done?

In an extended conversation about Islam with a friend of a friend, after quite a bit of writing back and forth, he asked, "What do you think should be done?" What you'll read below is what I wrote back. The reason I'm publishing this is because I think many of the people you talk to about Islam in your conversations haven't given it much thought and don't really know what kind of solution you have in mind, and I think sometimes they react in a way that rejects the solutions they assume you must have in mind. So it's worthwhile to let people know what you think ought to be done about it. They might have an easier time listening to what you have to say about Islam.

One of the things my friend of a friend mentioned was how comforting it is to know that most Muslims don't like terrorism. With all that in mind, here is how I answered him:

That's a good question. What is the solution? I think basic knowledge would be a good first start. Most people know almost nothing about Islam, even in the CIA and FBI. Even among politicians. I don't know all the solutions we'll come up with, but I know we'll make better solutions if we know what we're really dealing with.

If more of us knew more about Islam, I think we'd be less likely to make mistakes like foolishly allowing Sharia law to be written into the constitutions of both Iraq and Afghanistan. That was a big mistake. I don't believe it would have happened if more non-Muslims had read the Koran.

When someone in Afghanistan was going to be killed for converting out of Islam (apostasy is illegal, punishable by death under Sharia law), the U.S. State Department said, "Hey, what are you doing? Your constitution says you have freedom of religion." To which Afghans said, "Yes, freedom of religion within the bounds of Sharia law." The people in the State Department didn't know what they were dealing with.

So I think we need to at least know. That would be a start.

I think Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Norway are on the right track: They have explicitly banned Sharia law.

And I think another good thing to add would be a flex fuel bill. It has the potential to significantly cut off funds to Saudi Arabia, which is a major source of our problems with Islam. They fund madrassas and mosques around the world, and because they pay for them, they control what is taught there, and they are teaching orthodox Islam: Hatred of non-Muslims, political action, Sharia law for all, etc.

According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, Saudi Arabia controls an unbelievable 90% of the world's Islamic institutions. We need to cut off their money, and introducing mandatory flex fuel capabilities in cars sold in America would allow fuels to compete, which would bring down prices and take money away from Saudi Arabia.

We need more people who know more about Islam so that we can have more and better solutions to its growing influence.

I don't really want anything from Muslims. I want non-Muslims to stop pretending the problem doesn't exist. I want non-Muslims to discover that Islam is not a religion of peace and stop trying to pretend it is.

The biggest Muslim organizations in America — ISNA, CAIR, MSA, etc. — have all been created as arms of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the largest international Muslim organization in the world. And the Muslim Brotherhood has said, in internal documents, that violent acts of terror are tactically foolish against America. They think 9/11 set their agenda back because it caused Americans to learn more about Islam. So they have revamped their strategy to keep a low profile, to infiltrate, to undermine and to sabotage. Terrorism against America doesn't work. We're not the kind of people who cower in fear and comply. Overt acts of violence against us make us aggressive.

Anyway, the fact that many Muslims "hate terrorism" isn't as comforting as it ought to be.

And I agree with you, we should not overreact. And we should completely reject collective punishment, abandonment of reason, and we must keep the rule of law. I am advocating first and most importantly that people read the Koran. I think non-Muslims should know what's in it, mainly because so many non-Muslims assume they know what's in it and are dangerously mistaken. And I think you really have to read the whole thing to get the full impact of this amazing doctrine.

I don't think advocating knowledge is an overreaction.

I think in hundreds of little ways, once non-Muslims know what Islam is about, all the political insinuations of Islamic law into Western democracies will be curtailed, without bloodshed and without hatred. It will just be stopped because we would understand what is motivating it, we would understand what's behind it, and we wouldn't want any part of it once we knew what it was.

The Muslims-in-name-only can go on about their lives without any trouble — and without even knowing anything is going on. The active, orthodox Muslims will find themselves curbed whenever they try to limit freedom of speech or infiltrate the FBI or any of the other things they've been able to get away with because so few people know even the most basic information about Islam.

One place we differ is that you think things are already getting better, and I think things are getting worse. Muslim infiltrators with a political objective (Islam's prime directive) have gotten into the military, the FBI, the CIA, and actually advise President Obama just as they did with former President Bush. Why? Because even people at that high level believe the nonsense that Islam is a religion of peace. Muslims are gaining control of cities in Europe, the "radicals" are regaining control in Turkey and Egypt, they are gaining control of Lebanon, Malaysia, and Indonesia. They are exerting influence over American media, Hollywood movies, what's written in American textbooks, and it goes on and on and on. Not much is getting better. And lots of things are getting worse. And I'm an optimist!

I think your attitude that "things are getting better" is just another way to try to put this issue in a box so you don't have to worry about it any more. Throughout this conversation you seem to have tried your best to come up with anything you could think of to avoid having to accept the existence of something you don't want to be true. It reminds me of that scene from the first Terminator movie.

Kyle Reese has been sent back from the future to protect Sarah Connor, but she thinks she will just get away from the terminator and go on about her life. She was refusing to get it. Didn't want to get it. Does this sound familiar?

Kyle finally grabs her wrists and yells at her: "Listen! That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely WILL NOT STOP — EVER — until you are DEAD!"

At that point, she doubled over. All the breath went out of her body. It looked like she'd been punched in the stomach. She finally realized her situation. She stopped resisting it and started thinking about what could be done about it.

It seems to me you're not there yet. You still think you can go on with your life and ignore it and everything will be okay.

But it will not stop. It will keep getting worse until it intrudes in your life in a way you can't ignore. You're a smart man. I believe some day you will get it, and it will hit you hard. But after that point, you'll stop resisting it and start thinking about what should be done about it.

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How to Stay Relaxed and Feeling Good While Talking About Islam

WHEN I WAS in high school, I remember my friends and I making the observation that when we didn't have girlfriends, girls didn't seem interested in us, but once we had a girlfriend, suddenly interested girls were everywhere we turned. And we knew why: Because we no longer felt we needed a girlfriend. We didn't have that anxious mood about us any more. If girls liked us, that was fine with us. And if they didn't like us, that was fine with us too, now that we had someone who liked us a lot. We were confident, self-assured, and relaxed.

The same principle applies to talking about Islam. If you can find a way to not "need" someone to believe you or agree with you, they are more likely to believe you and agree with you.

So if you find yourself getting somewhat upset during conversations about Islam, I suggest you change the way you think about it so if someone agrees with you, that's fine with you. And if they don't agree with you, that's fine with you too. But I mean really fine with you (rather than trying to convince yourself it's fine, even though you are actually upset). Find a way to think about it so you feel good about it however the conversation goes.

How can you think about it so you have that kind of relaxed confidence? Experiment with different perspectives and see what works for you. For example, I have convinced myself that I am on "the leading edge" and that eventually it will become common knowledge that the doctrines of Islam are not peaceful but intolerant, politically domineering, and violent. Over the last nine years of writing this blog, I have seen good evidence that my assumption is true: More and more non-Muslims are waking up to the truth about Islam.

Since that's the case, any particular individual I'm talking to doesn't really matter in the long run. If they believe me, I have gained one more recruit to our side. If they don't believe me at the moment, they will eventually learn the truth, and they'll remember I'm the one who said it first. I know this is a little silly, but this perspective works for me. It helps me not have any anxiety about whether they are convinced or not. This helps prevent me from getting upset, and makes me more persuasive.

Here's another perspective I have deliberately cultivated: There are already a whole bunch of us who have educated ourselves about Islam. In other words, I already have a girlfriend. Of course, being Citizen Warrior, I am in communication with a lot of people who share my understanding of Islam. But anyone can find plenty of like-minded thinkers by reading the comments on Take the Pledge: Read the Quran, reading the comments on Jihad Watch articles, joining a counterjihad Facebook group, etc. You can easily expose yourself to an almost unlimited number of educated counterjihadists who share your understanding of the situation. And when you do, it will help you feel less alone, isolated, or "needing" anyone's approval on this topic.

And another perspective I cultivate is a trust that if things get worse — if we can't reach enough people fast enough — it will only cause more people to open their minds to the facts about Islam (click here for an example). There was a strong movement in the United States against getting involved in "Europe's war" until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Then suddenly the majority of Americans completely changed their opinion.

I know what you're thinking: 9/11 didn't suddenly change everyone's opinion. But it did wake up many of us, and we're waking up the rest. And each "mistake" orthodox Muslims make causes more of us to awaken, so even if I completely fail to convince anyone in a one-on-one conversation, I have planted the seeds of understanding, and as events unfold, they will come to see the truth, so I don't need to convince them now.

These perspectives help me stay relaxed in conversations, and make me more persuasive. I'm sure they are but a few of the many possible perspectives that might help. Experiment with yourself and find what works for you. And if you would be so kind, please share with us what works here: Talk About Islam Among Non-Muslims.

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