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Games islam plays
Given Islam's violent history and the unfavorable contrast that its oppressive practices have against 21st century values, Muslim evangelists are hard-pressed to repackage their faith in the modern age.  Apologists have come to rely on tricks involving semantics and half-truths.  This propaganda is, in turn, repeated verbatim by other unsuspecting (yet sincere) Muslims and well-meaning progressives outside the faith.

Here I'll try to expose some of these games, and help truth-seekers find their way through the maze of disingenuous and false claims about Islam and its history. 

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The Game:
Most Muslims live peacefully, without harming anyone, so how can Islam be a violent religion?
If Islam were the religion of terrorists then why aren’t most Muslims terrorists?

Answer
This argument presumes that it is valid to make assumptions about an ideology based on the behavior of adherents.  However, if this were the case, then we would have to conclude that Islam is different and dangerous.  True, most Muslims are not terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslim.  If Islam is a religion of peace, why is it the only one that consistently produces religiously-motivated terrorist attacks each and every day of the year?

Rather than answer a question with a question, let's just say that the reason most Muslims don't kill is that, regardless of what Islam may or may not teach, it's wrong to kill over religion.  Most people know deep down that if God wanted people dead for not believing in Him, then He's perfectly capable of doing the job Himself.

Here's a similar question with identical logic to the "If the Quran taught violence then all Muslims would be violent" argument:
"If the Quran taught that a thief's hand should be cut off, then all Muslims would cut off hands."
We can all agree that very few Muslims cut off hands and that a majority (perhaps) believe it is wrong to do so.  If the logic were sound, then this would be proof that the Quran does not say to cut off hands.

But the Quran does say this... quite explicitly, in fact:
Cut off the hand of the thief, male or female, as a recompense for that which they committed, a punishment by way of example from Allah. Quran 5:38
This is also the example set by Muhammad according to the Hadith (Bukhari 81:792).  Yet, the vast majority of Muslims do not do this

Continued next post

What this means is that proof of what Islam teaches or what the Quran says is not necessarily found in what the majority of Muslims choose to do or not do.

As individuals, Muslims make their own choices about which parts of their religion they practice and which parts they would rather dismiss via the guise of "context".

Adherents may think or say whatever they want to about Islam, it doesn't change what Islam says about itself.  As a documented ideology, Islam exists independently of anyone's opinion.   As such, it may be studied objectively, apart from how anyone practices or chooses to interpret it.

The Quran plainly teaches that it is not only proper to kill in the name of Allah in certain circumstances, but that it is required.  Muslims who don't believe in killing over religion either do not know of Muhammad's example or tacitly prefer a moral law that is independent of it.  Those who put Islam first or know Islam best will think and act differently, even if they are in the minority.

Few Muslims have ever read the Quran to any extent, much less pursued an honest investigation of the actual words and deeds of Muhammad (which were more in line with hedonism, deception, power and violence than moral restraint).  The harsh rules that Muslim countries impose on free speech to protect Islam from examination also prevent it from being fully understood.

As Taslima Nasreen succinctly puts it, "Islam is a violent ideology.  Most Muslims are not violent - because they believe Islam is not violent."

In the West, many Muslims, devout or otherwise, simply prefer to believe that Islam is aligned with the Judeo-Christian principles of peace and tolerance, even if it requires filtering evidence to the contrary.  They read into the Quran what they want to see.

But, while most Muslims are peaceful in spite of Islam, others are dangerous because of it. It is what some of us comfortably refer to as "radicalization" - an 'affliction' that is conspicuously endemic to Islam.

Purists who take Islam to heart are more likely to become terrorists than humanitarians.  Those most prone to abandoning themselves to Muhammad's message without a moral filter are always the more dangerous and supremacist-minded.  They may be called ‘extremists’ or ‘fundamentalists,’ but, at the end of the day, they are dedicated to the Quran and the path of Jihad as mandated by Muhammad.

This explains why Islam is a constant challange that becomes harder to deal with as the number of Muslims increases.

*****Even Christians aren't perfect and never will be until Christ rules this world during the millennium

I'll add more tomorrow

Bringing other religions down to the level of Islam is a favorite tactic of apologists confronted with the spectacle of Islamic violence.  Remember Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber? How about Anders Breivik, the Norwegian killer? Why pick on Islam if other religions have the same problems?

The Answer

Because they don’t have the same problem.

Timothy McVeigh is a good example of how the game works.  Since his birth certificate says he was Catholic, Muslim apologists will say that he was a "Christian terrorist."  Whatever objections are raised to this (ie. against the teachings) are then said to exonerate Islam as well, since it is also a religion.  This is a logical error called a "faulty generalization."  It is a conclusion based on insufficient premises.

In reality, details are important.  Regardless of what his birth certificate may or may not say, McVeigh was not a religious man (in fact, he stated explicitly that he was agnostic and that "science" was his religion).  At no time did he credit his deeds to religion, quote Bible verses, or claim that he killed for Jesus.  His motives are very well documented through interviews and research.  God is never mentioned.

The so-called “members of other faiths” alluded to by Muslims are nearly always just nominal members with no active involvement.  They are neither inspired by, nor do they credit religion as Muslim terrorists do - and this is what makes it a very different matter.

Islam is associated with Islamic terrorism because that is the association that the terrorists themselves make.

Muslims who compare crime committed by people who happen to be nominal members of other religions to terror committed explicitly in the name of Islam are comparing apples to oranges.

Yes, people do sometimes die in the name of other religions - such as abortion clinic attacks in the US - but consider the scope of the problem.  For example, there have been seven deadly clinic attacks over a 44 year period in the U.S.  Eleven people died.  This is an average of one death every 4 years.

By contrast, Islamic terrorists staged nearly ten thousand deadly attacks in just the six years following September 11th, 2001.  If one goes back to 1971, when Muslim armies in Bangladesh began the mass slaughter of Hindus, through the years of Jihad in the Sudan, Kashmir and Algeria, and the present-day Sunni-Shia violence in Iraq, the number of innocents killed in the name of Islam probably exceeds five million over this same period.

Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 innocents in a lone rampage on July 22nd, 2011, was originally misidentified as a "Christian fundamentalist" by the police.  In fact, the killings were later determined to be politically motivated.  He also left behind a detailed 1500 page manifesto in which he stated that he is not religious, does not know if God exists, and prefers a secular state to a theocracy.  Needless to say, he does not quote any Bible verses that support his killing spree, nor did he shout "praise the Lord" as he picked people off.

In the last ten years, there have been perhaps a few dozen attacks in which death occurred at the hands of outliers motivated by a religion other than Islam (see GTD).  Such a small handful of loners acting in isolation can legitimately be chalked up to mental illness or (at best) genuine misunderstanding.

By contrast, Islamic terror is organized and methodical.  Islamist groups span the globe with tens of thousands of dedicated members, despite intensely targeted counter-measures.  Supporters number in the tens of millions.  They are open about their religious goals and they kill in the name of Allah each and every day of the year.  Verses in their holy texts arguably support them.  There are no video debates where they are challenged on theology by "moderates."

No other religion is doing this.  So, while some Muslims may pretend that other religions are just as prone to "misinterpretation" as is their “perfect” one, reality says otherwise.

The Quran never says to kill innocent people

The Answer

Yes, the Quran never says to kill innocent people.  Unfortunately, it does say that people who don't follow Allah's Law are not innocent - even if they are outwardly Muslim... and it does say to kill them.

This is explained in this article: Myth - It is Against Islam to Kill Innocent People

So, if a Muslim apologist asks where the Quran says to kill "innocent people," ask where the Quran states that non-believers are innocent - since it also says that they are being sent to Hell.

Verse 2:256 from the Quran is often quoted to prove what a tolerant religion Islam is.  The verse (supposedly) reads in part, "Let there be no compulsion in religion; truth stands out clearly from error..."

The Answer

The word "let" is not in the Arabic, so the verse is not an imperative.  What it actually says is "there is no compulsion in religion..."  It is a statement that true belief can't be forced.  However, this is not to say that others can't be forced into an outward manifestation of faith, such as the pillars of Islam:

Allah's Apostle (Muhammad) said, "I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah'. And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally."  Bukhari 8:387

Even within the same sura (chapter) of the Quran that verse 256 appears, Muslims are instructed to "fight with them (non-Muslims) until there is no more persecution and religion is only for Allah.  (v. 2:193)"  Apologists claim that this applied to the people of Mecca.  This is interesting because these same Meccans were later converted to Islam by force (compulsion).

Sura 2 is from the early Medinan period.  It was narrated at a time when the Muslims had just arrived in Medina after being chased out of Mecca.  They needed to stay in the good graces of the stronger tribes around them, many of which were Jewish.  It was around this time, for example, that Muhammad decided to have his followers change the direction of their prayer from Mecca to Jerusalem.

But Muslims today pray toward Mecca.  This is because Muhammad Allah issued a later command that abrogated (or nullified) the first.  In fact, abrogation is a very important principle to keep in mind when interpreting the Quran – and verse 2:256 in particular – because later verses (in chronological terms) are said to abrogate any earlier ones that may be in contradiction (Quran 2:106, 16:101).

Muhammad’s message was far closer to peace and tolerance during his early years, when he didn’t have an army and was trying to pattern his new religion after Christianity.  This changed dramatically after he attained the power to conquer, which he eventually used with impunity to bring other tribes into the Muslim fold.  Contrast verse 2:256 with Suras 9 and 5, which were the last “revealed,” and it is easy to see why Islam has been anything but a religion of peace from the time of Muhammad to the present day.

Though most Muslims today reject the practice of outright forcing others into changing their religion, forced conversion has been a part of Islamic history since Muhammad first picked up a sword.  As he is recorded in many places as saying, "I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah..."  (See Bukhari 1.2.24)

Muhammad put his words into practice.  When he marched into Mecca with an army, one of his very first tasks was to destroy idols at the Kaaba, which had been devoutly worshipped by the Arabs for centuries.  By eliminating these objects of worship, he destroyed the religion of the people and supplanted it with his own.  Those who would not convert were killed or evicted.  Later, he ordered that Jews and Christians be expelled from Arabia.  Does forcing others to choose between their homes or their faith sound like "no compulsion in religion?"

According to Muslim historians, Muhammad eventually ordered people to attend prayers at the mosque to the point of burning alive those who failed to comply.  He also ordered that children who reached a certain age be beaten if they refused to pray.

Interestingly, even the same contemporary Muslims who quote 2:256 usually believe in Islamic teachings that sound very much like religious compulsion.  These would be the laws punishing apostasy by death (or imprisonment, for females), and the institutionalized discrimination against religious minorities under Islamic rule that is sometimes referred to as “dhimmiitude.”

Islamic law explicitly prohibits non-Muslims from sharing their faith and even includes the extortion of money from them in the form of a tax called the jizya.  Those who refuse to pay this arbitrary amount are put to death.  If this isn’t compulsion, then what is?

Muslims love talking about the Crusades... and Christians love apologizing for them.  To hear both parties tell the story, one would think that Muslims were just peacefully minding their own business in lands that were legitimately Muslim when Christian armies decided to wage holy war and "kill millions."

Time for some quick facts...
The first Crusade began in 1095… 460 years after the first Christian city was overrun by Muslim armies, 457 years after Jerusalem was conquered by Muslim armies, 453 years after Egypt was taken by Muslim armies, 443 after Muslims first plundered Italy, 427 years after Muslim armies first laid siege to the Christian capital of Constantinople, 380 years after Spain was conquered by Muslim armies, 363 years after France was first attacked by Muslim armies, 249 years after the capital of the Christian world, Rome itself, was attacked by a Muslim army, and only after centuries of church burnings, killings, enslavement and forced conversions of Christians.

By the time the Crusades finally began, Muslim armies had conquered two-thirds of the Christian world.

Europe had been harassed by Muslim aggression since the first few years following Muhammad’s death.  As early as 652, Muhammad’s followers launched raids on the island of Sicily, waging a full-scale occupation 200 years later that lasted almost a century and was punctuated by massacres, such as that at the town of Castrogiovanni, in which 8,000 Christians were put to death.  In 1084, ten years before the first crusade, Muslims staged another devastating Sicilian raid, burning churches in Reggio, enslaving monks and raping an abbey of nuns before carrying them into captivity.

In 1095, Byzantine Emperor, Alexius I Comneus began begging the pope in Rome for help in turning back the Muslim armies which were overrunning what is now Turkey, grabbing property as they went and turning churches into mosques.   Several hundred thousand Christians had been killed in Anatolia alone in the decades following 1050 by Seljuk invaders interested in 'converting' the survivors to Islam.

Not only were Christians losing their lives in their own lands to the Muslim advance, but pilgrims to the Holy Land from other parts of Europe were being harassed, kidnapped, molested, forcibly converted to Islam and occasionally murdered.  (Compare this to the Quran’s justification for slaughter on the simple basis that Muslims were denied access to the Meccan pilgrimage).

Renowned scholar Bernard Lewis points out that the Crusades, though  "often compared with the Muslim jihad, was a delayed and limited response to the jihad and in part also an imitation.... Forgiveness for sins to those who fought in defense of the holy Church of God and the Christian religion and polity, and eternal life for those fighting the infidel: these ideas... clearly reflect the Muslim notion of jihad."
"unlike the jihad, it [the Crusade] was concerned primarily with the defense or reconquest of threatened or lost Christian territory... The Muslim jihad, in contrast, was perceived as unlimited, as a religious obligation that would continue until all the world had either adopted the Muslim faith or submitted to Muslim rule... The object of jihad is to bring the whole world under Islamic law."

If someone takes your wallet and you take it back, who is the real thief?

The Crusaders only invaded lands that had been Christian.  They did not attack Saudi Arabia (other than a half-hearted expedition by a minor figure) or sack Mecca, as the Muslims had done (and continued doing) to Rome and Constantinople.  Their primary goal was the recapture of Jerusalem and the security of safe passage for pilgrims.  The toppling of the Muslim empire was not on the agenda.

The period of Crusader “occupation” (of its own former land) was stretched tenuously over about 170 years, which is less than the Muslim occupation of Sicily and southern Italy alone - to say nothing of Spain, Bulgaria and other lands that had never been Islamic before falling victim to Jihad.  In fact, the Arab occupation of North Africa and Middle Eastern lands outside of Arabia is almost 1400 years old.

Despite popular depiction, the Crusades were not a titanic battle between Christianity and Islam.  Although originally dispatched by papal decree, the "occupiers" quickly became part of the political and economic fabric of the Middle East without much regard for religious differences.  Their arrival was largely accepted by the local population as simply another change in authority.  Islamic radicals even lamented the fact that many of their co-religionists preferred to live under Frankish (Christian) rule than migrate to Muslim lands.

The Muslim world was also split into warring factions, many of which allied themselves with the Frankish princes against each other at one time or another.  This even included Saladin, the Kurdish warrior who is credited with eventually ousting the "Crusaders."  Contrary to recent propaganda, however, Saladin had little interest in holy war until a rogue Frankish prince began disrupting his trade routes.  Both before and after the taking of Jerusalem, his armies spent far more time and resources battling fellow Muslims.

For its part, the Byzantine (Eastern Christian) Empire preferred to have little to do with the Crusader kingdoms and went so far as to sign treaties with their Muslim rivals on occasion.

Another misconception is that the Crusader era was a time of constant war.  In fact, very little of this overall period included significant hostilities.  In response to Muslim expansion or aggression, there were only about 20 years of actual military campaigning, much of which was spent on organization and travel.  (They were from 1098-1099, 1146-1148, 1188-1192, 1201-1204, 1218-1221, 1228-1229, and 1248-1250).  By comparison, the Muslim Jihad against the island of Sicily alone lasted 75 grinding years.

Ironically, the Crusades can be justified from the Quran itself, which encourages Holy War in order to "drive them out of the places from whence they drove you out" (2:191).  However, in this case the objective wasn't to expel Muslims from the Middle East, but to bring an end to the molestation of pilgrims.  Holy war is not justified by New Testament teachings, which is why the Crusades are an anomaly, the brief interruption of centuries of relentless Jihad against Christianity that began long before and continued well after that event.

The greatest crime of the Crusaders was the sacking of Jerusalem, in which at least 3,000 people were said to have been massacred.  This number is dwarfed by the number of Jihad victims, from India to Constantinople, Africa and Narbonne, but followers of Islam have never apologized for their crimes and never will.

What is called 'sin and excess' by other religions, is what Islam refers to as duty willed by Allah.

Muslims sometimes claim that Muhammad never killed anyone.  By this, they usually mean that he never slew anyone with his own hand (except in battle… which they may or may not remember to mention).

The Answer

By this logic, Hitler never killed anyone either.

Obviously, if you order the execution of prisoners or the murder of critics by those who are under your command, then you are at least as guilty as those who carry out your orders.  In Muhammad’s case, the number of people that he had murdered were literally too many for historians to fully know.

There were the men taken prisoner at Badr (including one who cried out for his children at the point of execution), a mother of five (stabbed to death for questioning Muhammad’s claim to be a prophet), dozens of Jewish citizens, including poets and merchants who were accused of mocking Islam, numerous adulterers, at least one slave girl, 800 Qurayza men and boys taken captive and beheaded on Muhammad’s order, a Qurayza woman made delirious by the execution of her family, and an unfortunate individual who was tortured to death so that the prophet of Islam could discover his hidden treasure and then “marry” his freshly-widowed wife.

Indirectly, Muhammad is also responsible for the millions upon millions of people who have been slaughtered down through the centuries by those carrying on his legacy of Jihad.  Not only did he kill, he is truly one of the bloodiest figures in history.