a few observations on shoebat, Muslim rhetorical techniques, and critics of Islam

Submitted by S McCosker (Australia), Mar 16, 2008 at 23:45

First: Walid Shoebat is not alone. His warnings concerning the destructive character of traditional Islam and his 'take' on the Third Jihad - that is, the third major historical attempt, by the Islamosphere, to take over the known world - are shared by, for example, people such as Bishops Michael Nazir-Ali and Patrick Sookhdeo of the UK, or Daniel Shayesteh in Australia.

There are others besides Walid or 'Mark Gabriel' who have apostasised. Not all have become Christians, either: Ali Sina, Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali have become agnostics or atheists of the classic Enlightenment stripe. Yet all of these defectors from the Islamosphere speak with one voice concerning 1. Arab/Muslim anti-semitism (which eagerly absorbed and now zealously perpetuates Soviet and Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda tropes, because it was already, by Qur'an, Sira and Hadith, programmed to fear, exploit, abuse and despise Jews, and had been doing so for 1300 years)

2. Islam's historic and contemporary goal of Total World Domination, that is, the use of ultraviolence and/or fraud and deceit to subject all humans to Muslim despotism/s 3. the oppressiveness and cruelty of traditional Muslim sharia law, especially as regards non-Muslims, but also as applied to women. Second: the Muslim posters here (whether openly Muslim, or concealed behind non-Muslim nicknames), whether speaking about Mr Shoebat or engaging with other posters, perfectly exemplify the tactics of Muslim 'argumentation' that I have observed in many other such discussions. Namely: personal abuse, tu quoque and turnspeak, bizarre conspiracy theories (what the inimitable Martha Gellhorn dubbed 'Mad Hattery'), and Big Lies.

Indeed: the charges against Mr Shoebat sound suspiciously similar to the charges made by many Muslims against others who dare to lift the lid on the - very extensive - dark side of Islam, past and present. I suspect that Bat Yeor, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Andrew Bostom and Robert Spencer, for example, have all received mountains of hate mail and had libellous accusations and patently false charges made against them. One must remember: Islam, which permits the cause of Islam to be advanced by deceit if deceit is what works best, then 'projects' onto non-Muslims its own duplicity.

ALL kafir are automatically assumed to be liars; all Muslims are prima facie assumed to be telling the 'truth' (hence, under sharia law, the word of a non-Muslim is always trumped by the word of a Muslim). Islam, which has historically used all manner of Machiavellian tactics (and some which possibly would have shocked even Machiavelli) routinely - even reflexively - accuses its perceived adversaries of doing what it has always done. Nor is it surprising that Shoebat is wildly accused of being a Jew in disguise, or a 'mossad agent' - if one knows that when Arab/ Muslims wish to insult a person - or, for that matter, a donkey! - the ultimate insult is to call that person, or that donkey, a 'Jew'. The charge, made against Shoebat, is both an insult and a conspiracy theory.

Final note: Islam does NOT mean 'peace', unless by 'peace' one means - "all non-Muslims either dead, or cringing and grovelling and paying extortionate 'protection money' to tyrannical and sneering Muslim standover men/ warlords/ despots, who if sufficiently well paid, MIGHT deign to allow them to remain alive". 'Islam' means 'surrender', that is, capitulation; in practice it means 'submission', as in Theo van Gogh and Hirsi Ali's film. Indeed, given a mountain of historical evidence of Islam's cruel enslavement of untold millions of people in three continents from the 630s to the present day (Sudan) one might as well, from the non-Muslim POV, define Islam as SLAVERY. Or even as the Arab Imperial Religion - a rationalisation for Arab supremacism and imperial exploitation and brainwashing of non-Arabs which turns them into Arab clones/ wannabes, slavishly imitating the 'Perfect Man', that is, a 7th century Arab warlord.

Or worse: as a de facto war cult/ human sacrifice cult analogous with that of the Aztecs or the Thuggees (the sheer scale and systematic, ritualised character of the mass murders that have been carried out throughout the entire history of the Islamosphere, both during jihad and also against subjected 'dhimmi' populations [e.g. Armenians] make one begin to wonder whether the mass killing is not merely a brutal means, as one sees in non-Muslims such as Genghiz Khan, but an end in itself). If Shoebat and his writings vanished from history and memory tomorrow, there would remain the sober, scholarly - and scathing - critique of Islam made, for example, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jacques Ellul, Robert Redeker, Tina Magaard, Antoine Fattal, S Goitein, K S Lal, V S Naipaul, Joseph Schacht, Samuel Zwemer, John Quincy Adams, and many, many others, Christians, Jews, Hindus, secular non-Muslims and also apostates from Islam, past and present. It adds up, folks, it adds up.

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