Samuel Huntington was one of America’s greatest political scientists. In 1993, he published a sensational essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations?” The essay, which became a book, argued that the post-cold war would be marked by civilizational conflict.Human beings, Huntington wrote, are divided along cultural lines — Western, Islamic, Hindu and so on. There is no universal civilization. Instead, there are these cultural blocks, each within its own distinct set of values.The Islamic civilization, he wrote, is the most troublesome. People in the Arab world do not share the general suppositions of the Western world. Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state. Their culture is inhospitable to certain liberal ideals, like pluralism, individualism and democracy.Huntington correctly foresaw that the Arab strongman regimes were fragile and were threatened by the masses of unemployed young men. He thought these regimes could fall, but he did not believe that the nations would modernize in a Western direction. Amid the tumult of regime change, the rebels would selectively borrow tools from the West, but their borrowing would be refracted through their own beliefs. They would follow their own trajectory and not become more Western.The Muslim world has bloody borders, he continued. There are wars and tensions where the Muslim world comes into conflict with other civilizations. Even if decrepit regimes fell, he suggested, there would still be a fundamental clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. The Western nations would do well to keep their distance from Muslim affairs. The more the two civilizations intermingle, the worse the tensions will be.Huntington’s thesis set off a furious debate. But with the historic changes sweeping through the Arab world, it’s illuminating to go back and read his argument today.In retrospect, I’d say that Huntington committed the Fundamental Attribution Error. That is, he ascribed to traits qualities that are actually determined by context.He argued that people in Arab lands are intrinsically not nationalistic. He argued that they do not hunger for pluralism and democracy in the way these things are understood in the West. But it now appears as though they were simply living in circumstances that did not allow that patriotism or those spiritual hungers to come to the surface.It now appears that people in these nations, like people in all nations, have multiple authentic selves. In some circumstances, one set of identities manifests itself, but when those circumstances change, other equally authentic identities and desires get activated.For most of the past few decades, people in Arab nations were living under regimes that rule by fear. In these circumstances, most people shared the conspiracy mongering and the political passivity that these regimes encouraged. But when the fear lessened, and the opportunity for change arose, different aspirations were energized. Over the past weeks, we’ve seen Arab people ferociously attached to their national identities. We’ve seen them willing to risk their lives for pluralism, openness and democracy.I’d say Huntington was also wrong in the way he defined culture.In some ways, each of us is like every person on earth; in some ways, each of us is like the members of our culture and group; and, in some ways, each of us is unique. Huntington minimized the power of universal political values and exaggerated the influence of distinct cultural values. It’s easy to see why he did this. He was arguing against global elites who sometimes refuse to acknowledge the power of culture at all.But it seems clear that many people in Arab nations do share a universal hunger for liberty. They feel the presence of universal human rights and feel insulted when they are not accorded them.Culture is important, but underneath cultural differences there are these universal aspirations for dignity, for political systems that listen to, respond to and respect the will of the people.Finally, I’d say Huntington misunderstood the nature of historical change. In his book, he describes transformations that move along linear, projectable trajectories. But that’s not how things work in times of tumult. Instead, one person moves a step. Then the next person moves a step. Pretty soon, millions are caught up in a contagion, activating passions they had but dimly perceived just weeks before. They get swept up in momentums that have no central authority and that, nonetheless, exercise a sweeping influence on those caught up in their tides.I write all this not to denigrate the great Huntington. He may still be proved right. The Arab world may modernize on its own separate path. But his mistakes illuminate useful truths: that all people share certain aspirations and that history is wide open. The tumult of events can transform the traits and qualities that seemed, even to great experts, etched in stone.A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 4, 2011, on page A27 of the New York edition.

I Q AL RASSOOLI
http://www.al-rassooli.com/
http://www.al-rassooli.com/blog/
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5BD231C51B5A1D0C
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qUcdPRdTu4
http://worldtruthsummit.com/al-rassooli.html


ISLAMIC HONOR KILLINGS
http://www.fillmoregazette.com/editors-picks?page=5
http://www.canada.com/life/Honour+killings+rise+Canada+Expert/3165638/story.html
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/getreligion/2013/07/bbc-silence-on-honor-killings-and-islam/


A Shocking Interview with I. Q. Rassooli, Islam Expert

 By Clare Lopez

 Family Security Matters

The Iraqi-born native Arabic-speaker who goes by the name “I. Q. Rassooli” has lived in Europe since his university days studying engineering in England. His mind is an inquiring and a questioning one, characteristics not much appreciated among the conformist Muslim community of his origins. And so he stayed in the West and, for the next 23 years, undertook “as thorough a study of Islam as humanly possible,” as he says.His research and analysis about Muhammad, the Qur’an, Hadiths, Shariah, Arab and Islamic history, and a comparative, contrasting study of those with the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Zoroastrian (Persian) beliefs, pagan Arab religions and more culminated in a thesis that no publisher would print. Instead, al-Rassooli created a website,   www.inthenameofallah.org that now contains over 780 chapters. He also put up over 280 audio/video chapters on YouTube that collectively received over 1.59 million visitors and 3,976 subscribers in the two years before YouTube removed took them down. Luckily, al-Rassooli had them all backed up on his blog site atwww.the-koran.blogspot.comand he then put them back up on YouTube under another name. His website is at www.alrassooli.com

Al-Rassooli also founded a movement called the Ummat al Kuffar (Nation of Infidels) that he hopes will develop and grow, given that some 80% of all humanity are not Muslims but rather the object of Islamic supremacist conquest intentions. He says his mission is the exposure of the facts and reality about Islam, based on the primary Arabic language sources themselves.Family Security Matters Contributing Writer Clare Lopez recently was granted the opportunity to interview I.Q. al-Rassooli about Islam. Here are his replies to her questions.

1. Is there such a thing as “moderate Islam” ?

It is very difficult for decent, well-meaning Americans and Europeans – who truly believe the propaganda of Muslims that Islam is only a religion and as such must have redeeming characteristics – to be told by myself and others who know Islam from the inside that the truth is quite different.Unfortunately, most Americans – as well as most of humanity – have been misled because Muhammadan Islam is not merely a religion but a cult belief system, the cult of Muhammad.Believing Muslims must follow Sharia. It is obligatory for all Muslims, everywhere, for all time. Sharia – based upon Muhammad’s Quran and Sunna (Muhammad’s acts, deeds, thoughts, behavior, etc. as recorded in the hadiths and Sira) – explicitly commands deceit, hatred, misogyny, racism, and warmongering against non-Muslims. There is no other “religion” that does this and this is why I say that Islam cannot be considered merely a “religion” like any other – and it most certainly cannot be called “moderate”.

For this is the command from Allah to all Muslims, as recorded in the Qur’an:

Al Tauba 9:29 “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and his apostle [Muhammad] nor acknowledge the religion of truth [ISLAM] (even if they are) of the People of the Book [Christians & Jews] until they pay the Jizya [onerous Tax for not being a Muslim] with willing submission and feel themselves humiliated”

Muhammad 47:4“Therefore when ye meet the Unbelievers smite at their necks; at length when ye have thoroughly subdued them bind a bond firmly (on them): thereafter (is the time for) either generosity or ransom”

2. How about “moderate Muslims” ?

There is no such thing as a ‘moderate Muslim’. Every Muslim – especially the males – is fundamentally a JIHADI. That is, one who will fight Unbelievers (currently 80% of humanity including ALL Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Atheists, Agnostics, etc.) – any and all those who do not follow Muhammad.

Sharia gives the Unbelievers the following three choices:

(A) Convert to Islam (whether we like it or not)

(B) Be subject to Islam as Dhimmis in humiliation and degradation forever

(C) Be Exterminated

Al Imran 3:85 ” If anyone desires a religion other than Islam (submission to Allah) never will it be accepted of him …”

Al Tauba 9:33 “It is He (Allah) who hath sent His apostle (Muhammad) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam) to proclaim it over all other religions…”

3. Why should defenders of Western civilization be concerned about core Islamic doctrine, law, and scripture?

Very simple. Sharia is the nemesis of Democracy. Sharia is the destroyer of all known freedoms. Sharia is anathema to genuine individual liberty and must NEVER take root on the soil of any nation that is not Islamic. Under Sharia, not even a blade of grass can grow.

4. Is the classic Islam of Muhammad and his companions and the early scholars compatible with Western-style liberal democracy?

For those who have still not understood what I am revealing, there is no concept of Democracy either in the psyche or the language of Islam. That is why the Arabs and Muslims use the Arabized Greek word for “democracy,” calling it “DEMOQRATIYAH”!

There is absolutely nothing ‘liberal’ about either Sharia or Muhammadan Islam. Muhammad, after all, declared to his followers

Sahih Al-Bukhari Hadith 4.73 Narrated by Abdullah bin Abi Aufa

Allah’s Apostle said, “Know that Paradise is under the shades of swords.”

In fact, believing Muslims are not allowed to so much as question Islam, again per the Qur’an:

O ye who believe! ask not questions about things which, if made plain to you, may cause you trouble  — Q 5:101

…the command of Allah is a decree determined  — Q 33:38

5. If people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, took the time to read and study the Qur’an, what would they learn?

I have spent more than 30 years on these subjects and not once did I attempt to change the indoctrinated mind of a follower of Muhammad, knowing full well it would be extremely difficult.

Most important of all, Americans must understand that any Muslim who leaves the faith would be killed by his own ‘loving’ family and or friends. Even in our Western democracies, most of those who leave Islam must do so in secrecy.

“Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” – Bukhari 9.84.57

“When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostasizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.”  — Reliance of the Traveller, A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law (08.1)

“If they [Muslims] had gotten rid of the punishment [often death] for apostasy, Islam would not exist today.”  Yousef al-Qaradawi, Senior Jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood, on Egyptian TV

Any decent and fair-minded person reading Muhammad’s Quran must come to only ONE conclusion: It is a rambling, incoherent, jumbled scripture of hatred and enmity that no true God would have ever revealed to anyone.

6. What is the most important thing Westerners should know about the life of the Muslim prophet Muhammad ?

First and foremost, Muhammad should not be called a “prophet” because there is nowhere in his Qur’an and Hadith that he prophesized anything. Instead, in the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the Sira (biography of Muhammad), we read in the original Islamic scriptures themselves that Muhammad committed crimes against humanity on a massive scale: these scriptures themselves recount that Muhammad ordered assassinations of the elderly and nursing mothers because they ridiculed him; that he raped and enslaved captured women; that he personally participated in the mass killing of POWs; that he led a military campaign of genocide against the Jewish tribes of the Arabian Peninsula; and that he married a six-year-old and raped her at aged nine (his child bride, Aisha). I say this not because of anger or a mere wish to be insulting. I do so based entirely on the Islamic records themselves that I can quote in chapter and verse to support my assertions.For example, each of these assertions may be found precisely as described in the Sirat (biographies) of Muhammad, as written by faithful Muslims. One of the most authoritative of those biographies comes to us from the Muslim historian Ibn Ishak, as translated by Alfred Guillaume: “The Life of Muhammad.” It is available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Life-Muhammad-I-Ishaq/dp/0196360331

7. Is there a significant number of Muslims in the world today who are willing to contradict, either publicly or within their own communities, Islamic teachings on things like the death penalty for adultery, apostasy, or homosexuality?

No Muslim can live more than a few seconds if he/she in any way shape or form contradicts anything in Muhammad’s Quran or says anything against him. Only a handful of apostates from Islam can do so in our democracies.

Please understand that the instant any follower of Muhammad criticizes anything about their cult belief system, that person becomes instantly an infidel worthy of death and destruction.

Again, to cite from the Reliance of the Traveler: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law:

Acts That Entail Leaving Islam

08.7 (3) to speak words that imply unbelief…

(4) to revile Allah or His messenger…

(7) to deny any verse of the Koran or anything which by scholarly consensus belongs to it…

(14) to deny the obligatory character of something which by the consensus of Muslims…is part of Islam…

8. What can or should free people do to ensure that their societies do not fall under the domination of Islamic Law (shariah) ?

Each and every American who cherishes their Constitution and FREEDOM (of thought, belief, association, politics, religion, thought, etc.) must not allow any judge or administration to allow Islamic Law (shariah) the slightest chance of taking root on American soil because Sharia is like a virulent virus, the most deadly known to humankind.

My conclusions based on over 30 years of studies are:

1. Islam is NOT a Religion but most definitely a CULT belief system as well as a legal, military, political, and social system of totalitarian control.

2. Allah is most assuredly NOT the same as the God of Jesus, Moses and Abraham because Allah is only the NAME of the supreme moon god of Pagan Arabia centuries before Muhammad and his Quran and represented to this day in the Kaba’a by an ancient meteorite called the Black Stone.

3. Jihad is most definitely NOT a spiritual struggle to commune with God but eternal WAR against all Unbelievers until all humanity is subject to Sharia.

4. No god called Allah nor any angel called Gabriel ever revealed a single verse to Muhammad because every letter, word, verse and Chapter in the Quran is the product of Muhammad’s imaginings, the secretions of his depraved mind, his Alter Ego, his Autobiography, but very cleverly projected into the unsuspecting mouths of Allah and Gabriel to give them the aura of sanctity and divinity.

5. It is by Divine Will (Qidra Ilahyyah) and divine Justice (Haq Ilahi) that the very Hadiths that explain to the followers of Muhammad his Quran and Sunna, are the very same that utterly DISCREDIT Muhammad as a prophet and the ALLEGED divine origin of his Quran.

6. Although my statements may sound outrageous and hyperbolic to those hearing and seeing them for the first time, I can and do (as in this interview) corroborate every single assertion that I make with citations from the Islamic scriptures themselves.

Clare M. Lopez a senior fellow at the Clarion Fund, writes regularly for RadicalIslam.org, and is a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on Middle East, national defense, and counterterrorism issues.