The Opening

A story with Two Punch lines

“The apostle said: ‘Kill any Jew that falls into your power.’ Thereupon Muhayyisa bin Mas’ud leapt upon Ibn Sunayna, a Jewish merchant with whom they had social and business relations, and killed him.
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Huwayyisa was not yet a Muslim at the time, though he was the elder brother. When Muhayyisa killed him Huwayyisa began to beat him, saying, ‘You enemy of Allah, did you kill him when much of the fat on your belly comes from his wealth?’ Muhayyisa answered, ‘Had the one who ordered me to kill him ordered me to kill you, I would have cut your head off.
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He said that this was the beginning of Huwayyisa’s acceptance of Islam. The older replied, ‘By Allah, if Muhammad had ordered you to kill me would you have killed me?’ He said ‘Yes, by Allah, had he ordered me to cut off your head I would have done so.’”
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He exclaimed, ‘By Allah, a religion which can bring you to this is marvellous!’ and he became a Muslim.”
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In the year 624 of the Common Era, the second year of Muhammad’s career as the tyrant of Medina, emboldened by his first military victory at Badr, he proceeded to deal with his local adversaries: the Jews who rejected him and his new religion.
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He has had it with the Jews, who rebelled against him, refused to accept him as a true prophet, and mocked him for his ignorance.
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The first victims were the tribe of Qaynooqa’. He confiscated their property and expelled them from their hometown.
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He also took revenge on one Ka’b bin al-Ashraf, a prominent leader and poet from the Jewish tribe of Nadhir in Medina, who had been insulting Muhammad with his satirical poetry.
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The story cited above relates an event that took place right after Muhammad’s assassins returned with the good news of Ka’b’s demise.
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The first punch-line of this story is “had he ordered me to cut off your head I would have done so”. It is pretty strong and scary, and the story could have ended there, showing what blind obedience can do to a man.
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But then we are hit with a second punch-line, which is doubly powerful: “a religion which can bring you to this is marvellous!”
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This Religion is Marvellous

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The idea that a religion that can so easily cause a man to cut off his own brother’s head for no reason other than being ordered to do so by the leader is a marvellous religion, is truly disturbing.
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I am not aware of any instance in early Islamic writings where this religion is extolled as marvellous for any of its other qualities, such as regular prayer and prostration, almsgiving, pilgrimage, caring for orphans, compassion towards debtors and so on, as it is extolled for its ability to turn ordinary people into senseless, robotic killers.
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I am also not aware of any other religion that boasts of this quality.
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It would not be unreasonable to assume that if he could, Huwayyisa would have said “By Allah, a religion which can bring you to this is so dangerous and deadly, that I’d better join it, while my head is still on my shoulders.”
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And as to following Muhammad’s orders to “kill any Jew that falls into your power”: during the next 13 centuries, there will be many occasions where Muslims, incited by Muhammad’s successors, would leap upon their Jewish neighbours, those who helped fatten their bellies as well as those who didn’t.
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There are numerous passages in Islamic scriptures that expressly preach the supremacy of everything Islamic over everything else, that teach Muslims to despise all others, that oblige Muslims to sacrifice life and property fighting and killing the Unbelievers who stand in their way.
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These Unbelievers are real people, living today. They are identified very clearly in the Quran: Jews, Christians, Mazdeans. They still exist, and are real targets.
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As long as the militant and confrontational Quranic passages are being cited on a daily basis by so many radical Islamic leaders in position of authority and influence (educators, clerics and politicians), poisoning the minds of Muslim youth and urging them to carry out these murderous acts, Islamic terrorism will keep claiming victims, and remain an existential threat to civilised societies.
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Thousands of Islam-inspired deadly attacks were committed since 11 September 2001, and there are clear signs that Islamic terrorism is growing in volume and sophistication.