Revised April 17, 2008                                                  Islam Review from The Pen vs. The Sword

Posted: September 27, 2006
10:17 p.m. Easte

© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com

With suicide bombings spreading from Iraq to Afghanistan, the Pentagon has tasked intelligence analysts to pinpoint what's driving Muslim after Muslim to do the unthinkable.

Their preliminary finding is politically explosive: it's their "holy book" the Quran after all, according to intelligence briefings obtained by WND.

In public, the U.S. government has made an effort to avoid linking the terrorist threat to Islam and the Quran while dismissing suicide terrorists as crazed heretics who pervert Islamic teachings.

"The terrorists distort the idea of jihad into a call for violence and murder," the White House maintains in its recently released "National Strategy for Combating Terrorism" report.

But internal Pentagon briefings show intelligence analysts have reached a wholly different conclusion after studying Islamic scripture and the backgrounds of suicide terrorists. They've found that most Muslim suicide bombers are in fact students of the Quran who are motivated by its violent commands – making them, as strange as it sounds to the West, "rational actors" on the Islamic stage.

Palestinian child pretends he's a suicide bomber

In Islam, it is not how one lives one's life that guarantees spiritual salvation, but how one dies, according to the briefings. There are great advantages to becoming a martyr. Dying while fighting the infidels in the cause of Allah reserves a special place and honor in Paradise. And it earns special favor with Allah.

"Suicide in defense of Islam is permitted, and the Islamic suicide bomber is, in the main, a rational actor," concludes a recent Pentagon briefing paper titled, "Motivations of Muslim Suicide Bombers."

Suicide for Allah a 'win-win'

"His actions provide a win-win scenario for himself, his family, his faith and his God," the document explains. "The bomber secures salvation and the pleasures of Paradise. He earns a degree of financial security and a place for his family in Paradise. He defends his faith and takes his place in a long line of martyrs to be memorialized as a valorous fighter.

"And finally, because of the manner of his death, he is assured that he will find favor with Allah," the briefing adds. "Against these considerations, the selfless sacrifice by the individual Muslim to destroy Islam's enemies becomes a suitable, feasible and acceptable course of action."

The briefing – produced by a little-known Pentagon intelligence unit called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA – cites a number of passages from the Quran dealing with jihad, or "holy" warfare, martyrdom and Paradise, where "beautiful mansions" and "maidens" await martyr heroes. In preparation for attacks, suicide terrorists typically recite passages from six surahs, or chapters, of the Quran: Baqura (Surah 2), Al Imran (3), Anfal (8), Tawba (9), Rahman (55) and Asr (103).

CIFA staffs hundreds of investigators and analysts to help coordinate Pentagon security efforts at U.S. military installations at home and abroad.

The Pentagon unit is especially concerned about a new wave of suicide bombings hitting Afghanistan.

Suicide bombings have killed more than 200 people in Afghanistan this year, up from single digits two years ago. On Tuesday, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest and killed 18 outside an Afghan government compound. Last week, a suicide bomber riding a bike killed at least four NATO soldiers. And earlier this month, a suicide car bomber rammed into a U.S. military convoy near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, killing 16 people, including two American soldiers.

500 suicide bombers in reserve

The U.S. command in Afghanistan now warns that a suicide bombing cell is operating inside the Afghan capital. Meanwhile, the Taliban's top military commander told ABC News he has 500 suicide bombers at his disposal.

"We have so many of them that it is difficult to accommodate and arm and equip them," Mullah Dadullah Akhund said. "Some of them have been waiting for a year or more for their turn to be sent to the battlefield."

The emergence of a suicide cell in Kabul troubles military analysts because suicide attacks are the most effective weapon Muslim terrorists can use against the West. The Rand Corp. predicts they'll pose a serious and constant threat to the U.S. for years to come.

The U.S. intelligence community is growing increasingly worried, as well.

"Most jihadist groups will use suicide attacks focused primarily on soft targets to implement asymmetric warfare strategy," warns the just-declassified executive summary of the National Intelligence Estimate on the global terror threat. "Fighters with experience in Iraq are a potential source of leadership for jihadists pursuing these tactics."

Many scholars and media pundits, however, insist Muslim suicide bombers are not driven by religion.

"Beneath the religious rhetoric with which [such terror] is perpetrated, it occurs largely in the service of secular aims," claims Professor Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago. "Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism."

He says U.S. foreign policy is more a factor than faith.

"Though it speaks of Americans as infidels, al-Qaida is less concerned with converting us to Islam than removing us from Arab and Muslim lands," Pape said.

But what about the recent video by Adam Gadahn, the American al-Qaida, warning fellow Americans to convert to Islam before al-Qaida attacks again?

"He never mentions virgins or the benefits Islamic martyrs receive in Heaven," Pape asserted.

In fact, Gadahn notes 36 minutes into his speech that Allah reserves the highest rewards – "honors and delights" – for martyrs in Paradise.

"[He] promised the martyr in his path the reward over and above the reward of the believer," Gadahn said. "He has promised them honors and delights too numerous to go into here."

The 9/11 hijackers and the London bombers made martyrdom videos. In their last testaments, they recite the Quran while talking of their "love of death" and "sacrificing life for Allah." Seven martyrdom videotapes also were recovered by British authorities in the foiled transatlantic sky terror plot.

Before the 9/11 attacks, the hijackers shaved and doused themselves with flower water in preparation for their weddings with the beautiful virgins in Paradise. "Know that the women of Paradise are waiting, calling out 'Come hither, friend of Allah,'" according to a four-page letter circulated among them titled "THE LAST NIGHT." "They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing."

But are the virgins scriptural or apocryphal? French documentarian Pierre Rehov, who interviewed the families of suicide bombers and would-be bombers in an attempt to find out why they do it, says it's not a myth or fantasy of heretics.

He says there's no doubt the Quran "promises virgins" to Muslim men who die while fighting infidels in jihad, and it's a key motivating factor behind suicide terrorism.

"It's obviously connected to religion," said Rehov, who features his interviews with Muslims in a recently released film, "Suicide Killers." "They really believe they are going to get the virgins."

He says would-be Muslim suicide bombers he's interviewed have shown him passages in the Quran "in which it's absolutely written that they're going to get the girls in the afterlife."

Muslim clerics do not disavow the virgins-for-martyrs reward as a perverted interpretation of the Quran.

And even Muslim leaders in the West condone suicide bombings. British scholar Azzam Tamimi recently told 8,000 Muslims in Manchester, England, that dying while fighting "George Bush and Tony Blair" is "just" and "the greatest act of martyrdom." Earlier, he said it's "the straight way to pleasing Allah."

And the founder of an allegedly mainstream Muslim group in Washington – the Council on American-Islamic Relations – also has given his blessing to suicide bombings.

Addressing a youth session at the 1999 Islamic Association for Palestine's annual convention in Chicago, CAIR founder Omar Ahmad praised suicide bombers who "kill themselves for Islam," according to a transcript provided by terror expert Steve Emerson's Investigative Project.

"Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam, that is not suicide," Ahmad asserted. "They kill themselves for Islam."

Osama bin Laden has encouraged "Muslims brothers" to defeat the U.S. and U.K. with suicide attacks.

"I tell you to act upon the orders of Allah," he said in 2003, "be united against Bush and Blair and defeat them through suicide attacks so that you may be successful before Allah."

From WorldNetDaily.

. . . and from the Conservative Book Club:

PROOF: Islam is a violent, expansionist ideology that seeks the subjugation and destruction of other faiths, cultures and systems of government

While non-Muslim leaders and Islamic apologists in the U.S. and Europe continue to insist that Islam is a religion of peace, every day Muslims commit more violence in the name of Islam. Now, in Religion of Peace? Islam's War Against the World, author and filmmaker Gregory M. Davis reveals why. Setting out the shocking teachings of the Qur'an and other Islamic holy books, Davis shows that the Muslims who commit violence in the name of Islam are not distorting the teachings of a great religion -- in fact, they're carrying them out faithfully. Davis proves beyond any shadow of doubt that the jihadists the Leftist media has assured us are "extremists" are actually in the mainstream.

Davis also rebuts the notion that Islam is a great faith in desperate need of a Reformation. In traditional, mainstream Islam, he explains, religion and politics have from the beginning been intertwined and inseparable -- and no higher law exist beyond Muhammad's bloody teachings and example. Davis details how Islamic theology divides the world into two spheres locked in perpetual combat: the "House of Islam" and the "House of War." He shows why Islam is not a religion in the way Westerners usually understand the term, but rather a form of totalitarianism, a cruel and ferocious belief system that orders its adherents to conquer and subdue all those outside the fold. He demonstrates that Muhammad's words and deeds, and the Islamic law that has been formulated from them, have far more in common with Nazism than with the tenets of Christianity or Judaism.

Concise and thorough, this carefully reasoned book elucidates why most of the world's modern conflicts are connected to Islam -- and makes all the more urgent the question of why Western elites refuse to acknowledge Islam's violent nature. Religion of Peace? Islam's War Against the World is nothing less than a wake-up call to all civilized nations -- and one they ignore at their peril.

Not a religion of peace by a long shot:

• How, when it is correctly understood and practiced, Islam actively seeks the destruction of everything that is not itself

• The Christian notion of absolute standards of morality and justice: conspicuously absent from Islam

• Muhammad, Islam's prophet: how he forever established war and killing as acceptable -- indeed, holy and noble -- endeavors for all Muslim believers (and is responsible for killing hundreds, and possibly thousands, himself)

• Why the Western intellectual establishment simply cannot consider the possibility that Islam seeks global hegemony and the destruction of other faiths, cultures and civilizations

• The jarring reason why Islamic civilization, once great and powerful, lost its cultural, economic, and military superiority

• The new wave of Islamic violence in the modern era: not an innovation in Islam, but an Islamic exercise in "getting back to basics"

• Why it simply makes no sense to fight a "war on terror" -- and what we must do to defeat today's Islamic jihad

• Straight from the Qur'an: the Islamic justification for suicide bombing

• How even rape is justified in Islamic law -- as long as the victim is non-Muslim

• Why non-Muslims so often misunderstand the Qur'an and other core texts of Islam, and underestimate the violence and ferocity those texts inspire

• How Islamic apologists twist the truth when they quote ostensibly peaceful verses of the Qur'an to explain that Islam is a religion of peace

• Muhammad's marriage to a nine-year-old girl and his vicious, murderous cruelty: not crimes to be condemned in Islamic theology, but moral precedents to be followed

• How modern non-Muslim scholars ignore Muhammad's bellicosity, cruelty, and licentiousness while describing him as a "moral and social reformer"

• Totalitarian Islam: why the question of "What would Muhammad do?" applies as much to military strategy, international diplomacy, and social policy as it does to prayer and ritual

• How Islamic jihad differs in its fundamental character from Christian actions during the Crusades or any other time

• The Islamic principle that renders impossible any negotiated settlement between Muslim and non-Muslim states -- as well as any honest communication between pious Muslims and non-Muslims

• The great waves of Islamic expansion: how they proceeded according to Muhammad's instructions and in imitation of his example

• Why, although our own time has been marred by numerous spectacular acts of jihadist violence, awareness of Islam's violent nature was much greater in times past

• The chief barrier today to a better, more realistic public understanding of Islam

"Fascinating." - William F. Buckley Jr.

"A valuable, well-argued contribution to the public understanding of Islam...it manages to convey in a short space what the West needs to know about Islam: that its violent aspects are not the result of deviance but of orthodoxy"' -- Robert Spencer, author, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and The Crusades)

"A very important work at a very important time. Anyone interested in understanding the growing violence on the world scene today must read this book. Its message for America and the West is, `Wake up before it's too late.'" -- Gary Bauer, President, American Values

"This book provides a timely reality check to those still inclined to believe in the dichotomy between a "real" Islam and its allegedly aberrant violent fringe. That delusion costs lives and threatens the very existence of those affected by it. The refusal of the elite class to open its eyes to reality and protect Western nations from the threat is the biggest betrayal in history. It reflects a problem of cultural and spiritual decay that is the synthesis of all others." -- Serge Trifkovic, author, The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad