Islam and the West

Have the East and the West Always Been at War?

“If you are going to write history you must sacrifice to truth alone, ignoring everything else…

“Well, my historian should be like that: fearless, incorruptible, frank, a friend of free speech and the truth, determined, as the comic poet puts it, to call figs figs and a tub a tub, indulging neither hatred nor friendship, sparing nobody, not showing pity or shame or diffidence, an unbiased judge, kindly to everyone up to the point of not allowing one side more than it deserves, a stranger without a stake in his writings, independent, serving no king, not taking into account what any man will think, but simply saying what happened.”—Lucian (125-180 AD)[1]

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).

    …by  Jonas E. Alexis

David Horowitz
Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, editor of FrontPage magazine David Horowitz declared at the end of last month:
“[T]his is a war whose aims and purposes make it very hard to understand how anyone who is a supporter of human rights, or who believes in freedom, could be against it. In four years, George Bush has liberated nearly 50 million people in two Islamic countries.
He has stopped the filling of mass graves and closed down the torture chambers of an oppressive regime. He has encouraged the Iraqis and the people of Afghanistan to begin a political process that give them rights they have not enjoyed in 5,000 years…
“The rationale for this war was not, as critics claim, stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. This is a misunderstanding that was the product of political arguments during a Democratic primary season that were intended to unseat a sitting president, but they had grave fallout for the credibility and security of the nation itself.”[2]
Horowitz has to dismiss all of history in order to perpetuate the neoconservative fabrication that the Iraqis and Afghans had been enslaved for 5,000 years.
What he indirectly ended up saying is that Iraq and Afghanistan only needed the neoconservatives in the twenty-first century to sexually, politically, economically and intellectually liberate them from the shackles of tradition and historical backwardness.
It was reported last month that 16,000 Iraq war prisoners are still unaccounted for. According to Agence France-Presse:

“Kidnappings became increasingly common in the years of violence following the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, especially after militants bombed a Shiite shrine in Samarra in 2006, sparking a bloody sectarian conflict. While the violence has been brought under a semblance of control, many Iraqis are still searching for family members who went missing, holding on to hope that they are alive.”[3]

Let us not forget that 2.8 million people are still internally displaced in the region.[4] Let us not forget that the Syrian terrorists are reaching new grounds and crossing territories even in Iraq.[5] Let us not forget that Sunny identity is on the rise in the same region.[6]
More importantly, Horowitz does not seem to take into consideration the fact that Arabic countries have made enormous contributions to science, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, etc.[7] “From the eight century to the end of the fourteenth,” writes noted historian Toby E. Huff in The Rise of Early Modern Science, “Arabic science was probably the most advanced science in the world, greatly surpassing the West and China.”[8]
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
In fact, the word algebra was derived from Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi’s magnum opus Al-jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, a work that was translated into Latin and was widely known all the way to the sixteenth century as a rigorous mathematical work in major European universities.[9]
It was al-Khwarizmi who to a large extent separated algebra and geometry as two distinct but compatible fields of mathematics.[10] It was because of al-Khwarizmi’s Al-jabr wa-al-Muqabilah that Europe was able to develop a field of algebraic mathematics which still carries his name.[11]
This view is common knowledge among scholars and historians of mathematics.[12] This is even acknowledged by Philo-Semitic historians such as Niall Ferguson.[13]
Mathematician and historian E. T. Bell writes,

“While Europe slept and all but forgot Greek mathematics, the Moslem scholars were industriously translating all they could recover of the works of the classic Greek mathematicians. Several of these translations became the first sources from which Christian Europe revivedthe mathematics it had all but let die. For this timely service to civilization, the Moslems no doubt deserve all the gratitude they have received.”[14]
Al-Khwarizmi also contributed enormously to astronomical knowledge with detailed explanations, which “included results taken from both Ptolemy and Brahmgupta…The Algebra of Alkarismi holds a most important place in the history of mathematics, for we may say that the subsequent Arab and the early medieval works on algebra were founded on it, and also that through it the Arabic or Indian system of decimal numeration was introduced into the West.”[15]

Hence, the father of modern algebra is none other than al-Khwarizmi.[16] Al-Khwarizmi’s works, however, did not come out of thin air; they relied on earlier works of Greek philosophers and mathematicians and even Babylonian mathematics.[17]
In general, the Muslim world has made significant contributions to the West. Historian Paul Kenney of Yale writes in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,

“For centuries before 1500 the world of Islam had been culturally and technologically ahead of Europe. Its cities were large, well-lit, and drained, and some of them possessed universities and libraries and stunningly beautiful mosques. In mathematics, cartography, medicine, and many other aspects of science and industry—in mills, gun casting, lighthouses, and horse breeding—the Muslims had enjoyed a lead.”[18]

In his entire essay, Horowitz never mentions this. What he indirectly ends up saying is that for five thousand years, the Iraqis lived under the shackles of traditional values which suppressed them from reaching their full potential; they needed a messianic ideology such as the neoconservative dream, which eventually gave us neoconservative blessings such as Abu Ghraib, torture at Guantanamo, etc. And decent Americans have to pay for all of that.[19]
For five thousand years, the Iraqis needed to be existentially free, and that cost Americans six trillion dollars with little positive results.[20] Not only that, for more than thirty years the neoconservatives have been trying to pour more blessings upon us by propagating lies about Iran’s nuclear program.[21]
Horowitz continues to say,

“The war in Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction; it was about Saddam Hussein’s ten-year defiance of international law and his manifest determination to break the UN’s arms control arrangements in order to acquire weapons of mass destruction.”[22]

The Bush administration, the neoconservative crowd, and Tony Blair spent months convincing the American people and much of the Western world that Saddam had WMDs, and now Horowitz is telling us that the war had nothing to do with the lie that Saddam had WMDs!
Kenneth M. Pollack
Why would neoconservative hawks such as Kenneth M. Pollack of the Brookings Institute write books such as The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq?[23] Has Horowitz read Bush’s Decision Point?
If so, did he read it even half-way? Bush’s “most important speech” prior to the war was that Saddam had amassed uranium from Africa, making the silly case that Saddam had WMDs.[24]
Bush himself declares, “No one was more shocked or angry than I was when they didn’t find the weapons.”[25]
The statement is a bold lie,[26] but let us supposed for a moment that it was true, that Bush was surprised. Horowitz then has to answer this question: Why would Bush be shocked if the invasion had nothing to do with WMDs?
On September 8, 2002, the Bush administration declared unequivocally that “We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons.”[27] I’ll leave it up to Horowitz to reconcile the contradiction for us.
When it was discovered that Bush actually lied, new ideas supporting the war sprang up: that the war in Iraq was good in order to spread democracy.[28]
As James Wolcott of Vanity Fair recently declared in his essay “The Waning of the War Whores,”

“being a neocon means never having to say you’re sorry.”[29] In a similar vein, associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies Adi E. Shamoo recently pointed out, “The only message our children will take away from the war in Iraq is that if you repeat a boldfaced lie enough, it will someday become accepted truth. And as a corollary, saving face is much more important than admitting a mistake, no matter how destructive the outcome.”[30]

Muhammad Sahimi, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Material Science and the NIOC Chair in Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California declared,

“If the lies about Iraq have taught us anything, it is that we must pay due attention to the massive campaign of disinformation and lies that has been waged against Iran for over three decades, in order to “justify” a war with that nation.”[31]

But the question that any observer has to ask is simply this: if there are some instances where the East and the West work in harmony with respect to academic, intellectual and industrial pursuits—and this is even recognized by Jewish historian Bernard Lewis—what really happened? Why has the Muslim world revolted against the West?
The answers are complicated, but one of the major problems is that when the neoconservative ideology took over America and much of the West, double standards became apparent. Moreover, as we shall see in the summer or sooner when we discuss banking and looting, usury is universally condemned in Islam.
From the Middle Ages and beyond, usury was also condemned by the Church and many other religions because usury leads to theft and eventually to the downfall of any economic society. Usury was also condemned by Greek philosophers and Roman statesmen. The Roman statesman Cato for example equated usury with murder.
The West gave up on condemning usury long ago, but many countries in the Middle East continue to hold to the view that usury is wrong.  Of course no looter would accept that kind of law. And we know that the Rothschild has been trying to conquer the Middle East and other regions around the globe as well.[32]
In 2011, the British newspaper the Daily Mail reported that “The friendship of oddball financier Nat Rothschild, 39, scion of one of Europe’s most distinguished Jewish families, with Colonel Gaddafi’s epicene son, Saif, is remarkable.”[33] Chris Bollyn has already pointed out that the Rothschild and Gaddafi were politically in bed with each other.[34]
Sam Harris
These are indeed complicated issues which need robust historical analysis. There are indeed differences between Christianity and Islam, but the neoconservatives have hijacked the debate for their own political agenda.
Philo-Semitic scholars Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke make a stunning observation in their study America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order, published by Cambridge University in 2005.
They declare that in 1998, 90 percent of respondents in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, “had positive feelings toward the United States, while in 2003 opinion was 90 percent negative.”
One needn’t be an intellectual to figure out why. The war in Iraq is largely responsible for that negative attitude.
Moreover, neoconservative hawks and Zionists have become adept at demonizing Muslims and terrorizing decent Americans and with a steady diet of Hollywood’s propaganda for more than thirty years, the West has lost contact with the historical, theological, and friendly debate.

For Jewish intellectual Sam Harris, “The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.”[35]
Journalist Glen Greenwald, quoting Harris’ End of Faith, declared that Harris believed “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”[36]

Harris continues to be one of the greatest intellectual jokers in the twenty-first century. He has the tendency to swipe all historical data under the rug, abandon reason when reason is not in his favor, and marshal preposterous argument under the name of atheism. He simply is making decent atheists like Michael Ruse look very bad.[37]
Bernard Lewis
Jewish historian Bernard Lewis of Princeton, who is no friend of Islam and whose ideology we shall examine in the summer, declares,
“Generally speaking, Muslim toleration of unbelievers and misbelievers was far better than anything available in Christendom until the rise of secularism in the 17^th century.”[38]
Lewis admits that “Muslim scriptures and teachings are unequivocally different and contain nothing like the pacifist doctrines of the Gospels and some of the Hebrew prophets.
Muslims are nowhere commanded to turn the other cheek, or to love their enemies or even their neighbors…Koranic precepts and Muslim practice are much closer to the earlier books of the Old Testament and more particularly to Joshua.”[39]
Nevertheless Lewis has been named “perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq”[40] and perpetuated the fabrication in 2006 that Iran was working on a nuclear bomb to annihilate both Israel and much of the West,[41]
He writes in Islam: The Religion and the People:

“Muslim fighters are commanded not to kill women, children, or the aged unless they attack first; not to torture or otherwise ill-treat prisoners; to give fair warning of the opening of hostilities or their resumption after a truce; and to honor agreements.
In the medieval juristic literature, there are interesting discussions about the lawfulness of missiles, such as mangonels and catapults, and of chemical warfare, in the form of poison-tipped arrows and poisoning enemy water supplies.
Some jurists permit, some restrict, and some disapprove of the use of these weapons. At no time did the classical jurists offer any approval or legitimacy to what we nowadays call terrorism. Nor indeed is there any evidence of the use of terrorism as it is practiced nowadays.”[42]

I’ll let Harris quarrel with Lewis. And maybe it’s time for Lewis to tell Harris to be quiet or at least it’s time to tell him to do a little research before he writes his next book.
The question any serious scholar should ask is simply this: why was there such a long period of Muslim toleration? What really happened? Once again, Western double standards are largely responsible for the conflict we have been witnessing at the end of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first century.
Harris continues to say,

“We are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam… this is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with millions more than have any direct affiliation with Al Qaeda”[43]

The Syrian rebels are still a terrorist cell.[44] Will Harris, then, wage a war against them? Did Harris declare war against Yitzhak Shamir, a flaming terrorist who became the seventh Prime Minister of Israel and who died just last year?[45]
Does Harris wage a war against the state of Israel, which for more than fifty years has supported terrorists and terrorist cells and organizations[46] such as the MEK? The answer is actually no.

Then Harris dropped the atomic bomb: “All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the earth.”[47]

Where is the cavalry when you really need them?
I would say all civilized nations must unite in condemnation of Talmudic Judaism and all its geopolitical and  intellectual implications (Zionism, neoconservatism, etc), precisely because it threatens to destabilize much of the earth. If that is too harsh, consider again the six-trillion dollar war and the form of Trotskyism we are seeing in the Middle East.
Harris once again proves this point when he declared just last year:

“We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.”[48]

This is really beautiful. Should we profile Jewish revolutionaries, or anyone who seems to be a neoconservative or Zionist because he or she is going to lead us into perpetual wars in the Middle East? Should we profile those who refuse to apologize for the six-trillion dollar war?
I am pleased to announce that there are some decent Christians out there who want to restore balance where balance ought to be. And E. Michael Jones is probably one of those people who goes beyond the political matrix and delivers something that is historically, intellectually and spiritually satisfying. I would highly recommend his current e-book Culture Jihad in Tehran.

But neither the neoconservatives nor the Zionist machine—including Christian Zionism—can help us understand the serious issues we are facing here. Some Christian Zionists have labeled Islam the Antichrist, the one ruler who they say will one day rule the world![49]
We will deal with Christian Zionism fully in the summer, but let us say that if Christian Zionists want to go by sola scriptura, then sola scriptura refutes the very thing that they are trying to prove. The word “antichrist” is used only four times in the New Testament (all in first and second book of John), and it specifically talks about a metaphysical and categorical rejection of Christ. Here are two examples:

“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22)
“And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is in the world” (1 John 4:3).

Simple logic: if that spirit was active during John’s time, then what was it? Which of the three major religions that categorically and metaphysically rejects Christ as the Messiah? Certainly not Islam.[50]
Joel Richardson – Not his real name
Perhaps the major problem with Christian Zionists saying that Islam is the antichrist is that Islam did not come into the scene until the seventh century. And John tells us that the spirit of antichrist was at work even in the first century!
Right here we can dismiss books such as The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth About the Real Nature of the Beast, by Christian Zionist Joel Richardson, and we cannot deal with the errors he presented in the book at this time.
As we shall see in the summer, much of Christian Zionism turned out to be a propaganda machine as well.
Jerry Falwell for example was subverted by his own lust and greed when Israel bought him a private jet to spread the Christian Zionist movement in 1979. Falwell later received Israel’s Jabotinsky Award for his work.
As one press account declared,

“Jewish-evangelical relations had become so close by the early ’80s that, immediately after Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin telephoned Moral Majority leader Reverend Jerry Falwell before calling president Ronald Reagan to ask Falwell to ‘explain to the Christian public the reasons for the bombing. Falwell also served on the board of advisors of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, an organization founded by Rabbi Daniel Lapin…”[51]

The alliance between the large pool of evangelical Christians and the Zionist movement is so strong now that you don’t have to be a Christian in order to work for Zionist organizations. For example, David Brog, who is the executive director of John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUI), once made the statement during an interview that,

“Just to clarify, the evangelical theology I write about is not my theology. I’m Jewish.”[52] It was Brog who opposed the nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense.[53]

The question is very simple: how would Hagee feel if he hears that another pastor hires a Muslim to be the executive director for an organization entitled Christians United for Muslims? The whole evangelical world would go up in flame saying that the pastor hires a terrorist. But it is all right to have a non-Christian—not even a professing Jewish believer—to direct CUI.
In other words, Zionism has become almost as sacrosanct as the doctrine of the trinity in the minds of many evangelicals.
As an alternative to Christian Zionist books and non-dispensational theology, I would recommend Timothy Weber’s On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004); Stephen Sizer’s Christian Zionism: Road-Map to Armageddon? (Downer Grove: IVP Academic, 2005); E. Michael Jones’ Jewish Revolutionary Spirit (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008); Gary Demar’s Last Days Madness: Obsession of the Modern Church (Power Springs: American Vision, 2009); Genneth L. Gentry’s Before Jerusalem Fell: Dating the Book of Revelation (Powder Springs: American Vision, 1998); and Christianity & Rabbinic Judaism, vol. II (Bloomington: WestBow Press, 2013).
Once again we will discuss these issues more fully in the summer with much detailed information.

Editing:  Jim W. Dean

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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