The Islamic State released the fifteenth issue of their English-language Jihadi magazine, Dabiq, this past week, titled “Break the Cross.”

In the first issue following the attacks in Orlando, Nice, Normandy, Wurzburg, and Ansbach, ISIS orders even more attacks to be launched without delay.

In an effort to delegitimize the politically correct narrative that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS, they repeatedly clarify that their message is: There is no God but Allah, who “is to be worshipped alone via love, hope, fear, supplication, prostration, sacrificial slaughter, etc.”

Further, ISIS lays out point by point why they hate us and why they fight us:

• Because we are disbelievers who reject the oneness of Allah;
• because our secular liberal societies permit things prohibited by Allah;
• because of the crimes we commit against Islam, such as mocking the prophets and burning the Quran; and, finally,
• because of the crimes we commit against Muslims, such as bombing and invading their lands.

However, contrary to popular belief, they clarify that American foreign policy is not the sole, let alone main, reason that they attack us:

“The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.“

ISIS will not stop fighting until the West is willing to accept one of three options: conversion, submission by paying the jizyah (infidel tax), or death.

More than simply explaining why they fight us, this issue provides strategies on how best to bring down the West. For example, they suggest Muslim children learn infidel languages in order to spy on enemy communications or execute operations on infidel ground.

They also mention constructing a new language that would be used to “encrypt communication back and forth between [a jihadi] and the Islamic State foreign operations leadership before executing [an] attack against surveyed targets.”

As done in previous issues, Dabiq again stresses the importance of attacking the non-believer at home if you are not able to travel to the Islamic State, hitting the “Crusaders” where it hurts most, behind enemy lines, on their own territory. Finally, they give advice for future attacks, saying to keep their plans simple and effective, attacking as soon as possible.

The Islamic State further legitimizes their killing of civilians by arguing that every nation that claims to be ruled by the will of the people “has implicated their own populations in the crimes their militaries commit against the Muslim nation,” strengthening the Muslim obligation to target them.

This is a tactical deviation from previous issues, which placed a heavy emphasis on attacking U.S. law enforcement and military targets. ALL infidels are now a target, meaning that any large gathering of people — a sporting event, a movie theater, a mall — is  vulnerable, making the job of our law enforcement officers that much more difficult.

This report was originally posted at TheGorkaBriefing.com.

Yet another non-Muslim assures us that the Islamic State is not Islamic. And once again, his analysis is based on comforting falsehoods about Islam that will not convince even one young Muslim who is considering joining the Islamic State not to do so. In that case, what is the effect of articles like this one? To keep Americans from getting nervous about rising Muslim populations, and to keep them ignorant and complacent about the full nature and magnitude of the jihad threat.

More below.

“What our president should say about Islam,” by Mark Cunningham, New York Post, March 1, 2015 (thanks to Budd):

…Let us begin with the so-called “Islamic State.” I’ve heard a few complaints about my saying the IS is not Islamic; let me clarify.

What the Islamic State is, is a cheap and horrible fake — a con job.

Consider: The IS claims to be restoring the “pure Islam” of a past era, either of the time of the Prophet and the early caliphs, or of the later, medieval caliphates.

Yet, what — beyond its snuff videos — is the IS most known for? For slaughtering Christians, Yezidis and other non-Muslims, or expelling them from areas it controls.

Strange: These very same peoples survived and even thrived under Islamic rule for more than a thousand years, including under all the caliphs that IS cites as upholding “true Islam.”

What the IS tells other Muslims about its brand of Islam, in other words, is an outright lie.

Unfortunately not. The Islamic State actually slaughtered Christians, Yezidis and other non-Muslims, or expelled them from areas it controls, as part of its endeavor to reimpose Islamic laws over those years. This is true because these people “survived and even thrived under Islamic rule for more than a thousand years, including under all the caliphs that IS cites as upholding ‘true Islam,’” when they submitted to Islamic hegemony, paid the jizya, and lived as dhimmis, in accord with Qur’an 9:29 and the Sharia rules that were elaborated from that passage’s command that non-Muslims in the Islamic State must “pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” But the Ottoman Empire, the last caliphate, abolished the dhimma under Western pressure in 1856. After that Christians in the areas the Islamic State controls were no longer second-class except insofar as the laws governing dhimmis remained as a cultural hangover in the area. Under the relatively secular states of the Assads in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Christians and other non-Muslims had almost equal rights with Muslims.

Then came the Islamic State, and it wanted to reassert Islamic law. So it demanded that Christians submit and pay the jizya. When they refused, they were exiled or killed, in accord with Muhammad’s words: “Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them….If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them.” (Sahih Muslim 4294)

I submit to you that, as a simple matter of fact, Islam itself has prospered most when it has embraced such tolerance — and that we can see this from the time of the Prophet and beyond, when Islam exploded in a matter of decades from a handful of men to half the civilized world.

For, in the centuries before Mohammad, the Christian rulers of the Eastern Roman Empire had ruthlessly and bloodily sought to stamp out Christian worship that did not conform to their Orthodox faith. These savage campaigns decimated whole populations.

And then the Prophet and his armies rode in, and said to these Christians, and also the Jews, “Accept our rule and you may worship as you will — you’ll just have to pay a tax.”

No, this wasn’t much like the religious tolerance now practiced in the West. But it was far greater tolerance than the Byzantine Christians offered.

Cunningham’s ignorance of Islamic history is embarrassing. Muhammad is supposed to have died in 632. The Arab conquest of Eastern Roman imperial holdings began after that. The closest Muhammad got, according to Islamic tradition, was his attempted attack on the Byzantine imperial garrison at Tabuk, but the Byzantines left before he got there.

Cunningham reflects another widely held falsehood when he suggests that the Christians and Jews had it better under the Muslims than under the Byzantines. Islamic tradition has the caliph Umar making a telling admission in a message to an underling: “Do you think,” he asked, “that these vast countries, Syria, Mesopotamia, Kufa, Basra, Misr [Egypt] do not have to be covered with troops who must be well paid?” Why did these areas have to be “covered” with troops, if the Muslim invaders were more tolerant than the Byzantines?

This principle of tolerance continued to bolster Islam and its culture for centuries. Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish sages of all time, lived his entire life under Muslim rule — enriching not only Jewish understanding, but also laying the groundwork for thinkers of Islam’s Golden Age, such as Avicenna, Averroes and Al-Farabi.

Actually, Maimonides lived for a time in Muslim Spain and then fled that supposedly tolerant and pluralistic land, remarking, “You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us….No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have….We have borne their imposed degradation, their lies, and absurdities, which are beyond human power to bear.”

But Mark Cunningham is able to publish this nonsense in the New York Post not just because he is an editor there, but because his soothing falsehoods coincide with what the Western world so desperately wants to believe. But that doesn’t make it any truer.

This article was originally posted at the JihadWatch.org website.

Written by Stan Guthrie

Confucius once said, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.” When it comes to radical Islam, it’s clear that too many people have chosen foolishness over wisdom. The question is, in these dangerous times, are there enough of us willing to embrace wisdom?

Our answer will go a long way toward determining whether the West, founded upon Judeo-Christian principles, will prevail over radical Islam. For, as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said recently, “You cannot remedy a problem if you will not name it and define it.”

The Obama administration’s verbal contortions over the nature of our self-avowed enemies would be comical if they weren’t so seriously misguided. After a recent atrocity by the Islamic State (also called ISIS or ISIL), the president opined, “ISIL is not ‘Islamic.’ No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.” Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean offered this: “I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult.” These statements bring to mind the odd Bush administration mantra after 9/11: “Islam is a religion of peace.”

Then there’s the absurd statement by one of the current president’s spokesmen. He asserted that the Taliban—which murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and which saw one of its affiliates slaughter 132 schoolchildren and nine staff in Pakistan—isn’t a terrorist group. No, it’s merely an “armed insurgency.” Cut from the same cloth is the refusal by Al Jazeera’s English service to use words such as “terrorist,” “jihad,” and “Islamist” when describing Al-Qaeda and ISIS. As one executive at the network said, “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.”

Contrast this kind of politically correct denial with the growing realization in Europe that things must be called by their proper names. The massive march in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo massacres is one sign. Another is the willingness of growing numbers to speak up.

“Europe has tacitly accepted that from now on the freedom of satire is valid for everything but Islam,” writes Angelo Panebianco in Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper. “Now [Islamists] are aiming for a more ambitious objective to strike at the religious heart of the West, forcing us to accept that not even the pope is free to reflect aloud on the specificity of Christianity or that which differs from Islam.”

Czech President Miloš Zeman warns that the world faces a challenge similar to the Nazis. “We have to ask ourselves if a repeat of the Holocaust could happen,” Zemen said in a recent speech in Prague marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. “This time it would not comprise 6 million Jews, but rather members of countless faiths as well as atheists—and even Muslims. Which is why I would like to welcome the fact that moderate Arab countries recently joined in the battle against Islamic State.”

Another president, Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, says it is time for a fresh start for Islam, which he avows is a tolerant religion. “The terrible terrorist attacks which we have seen and this terrible image of Muslims is what led us to think that we must stop and think and change the religious discourse,” he said, “and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism. We need a new discourse that will be adapted to a new world and will remove some of the misconceptions.”

Removing those things won’t be easy. In an editorial, National Review acknowledges that most Muslims worldwide seek to live peacefully with their non-Muslim neighbors. But that does not end the discussion about whether Islam is a tolerant faith or ISIS killers are “true” Muslims.

The editorial notes “a large minority of Muslims—maybe hundreds of millions worldwide—who cleave to interpretations of their faith that enjoin murder, rape, torture, and cruelty as pious, even mandatory, acts. They take their diabolic faith seriously, and the result is what we saw in Paris. . . .

“Thus, there are in practical terms two Islams—a religion, if not of peace, then of peaceful accommodation, and a religion of death.”

That is so for several reasons that cannot be dismissed lightly. First, there appear to be two basic approaches to interpreting the Qur’an and how to make sense of verses that call for violence, side by side with those that call for peace and tolerance.

The older, classical school of interpretation, the one followed by the Islamists, endorses what is called the “law of abrogation.” This law, actually a hermeneutical principle, says that earlier verses in the career of Muhammad must be interpreted in light of later ones. If there is an apparent contradiction, they say the later ones must hold sway. Defending this approach, they point to verses such as 2:106: “When we cancel a message, or throw it into oblivion, we replace it with one better or one similar. Do you not know that God has power over all things?”

The problem for those who insist that “Islam is a religion of peace” is that the later verses reflect the more warlike stance of Muhammad and the Muslim community, when the movement was strong and aggressive. So the oft-cited verse, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256), has been abrogated in the minds of Islamists. They point to later verses, such as 9:5: “Kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush.” They say the later, more violent verses are controlling.

Of course, so-called “moderate Muslims,” such as El-Sissi, disagree. They point out that the law of abrogation implies that the Qur’an has errors, which they do not believe. It is an ongoing theological debate among Muslims worldwide.

There is a second reason we cannot dismiss the fact that there are at least two Islams around the globe. Simply put, there is no interpretative authority that all Muslims recognize. There is no “pope” or modern-day prophet to resolve all the theological disputes within Islam. Not only are there two main branches of Islam—Sunni and Shi’a—there are multiple religious leaders, each with varying levels of influence. While all Muslims revere the Qur’an and Muhammad and seek to follow the Five Pillars, they do not agree on all the particulars of the religion. Whatever you or I might think of the “true” DNA of Islam, if this global faith of 1.6 billion people is ever going to settle on a peaceful vision, it won’t be non-Muslims who talk them into it.

That’s why pronouncements from the White House or various media quarters about what constitutes “true Islam” are ludicrous. These self-appointed experts about Islam might as well declaim on whether all Christians must come under the authority of the pope.

Islam, in practical terms, is however Muslims themselves practice it—peacefully and violently. Let us pray for and encourage the former, knowing also that God is drawing many Muslims to Christ these days. But let’s also recognize that simply wishing for something doesn’t make it so.

We can start by calling things by their proper names.

This article was originally posted at the BreakPoint.org website.

 Islam in America
A Christian Response 
featuring Dr. Erwin Lutzer

May 7, 2015
CLICK HERE for Details

This is simple common sense. By going to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State’s jihad, these Muslims have joined an entity that has declared war against the United States. They have committed treason. They have forfeited the rights and privileges of citizenship. But it will be interesting to see who opposes this, and on what grounds.

“Cruz Files Bill to Ban American Islamic State Fighters from Returning to U.S.,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, January 23, 2015 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) will file legislation on Friday to ban American citizens who fight alongside the Islamic State (IS) and other terror groups from returning to the United States, where they pose a significant terror threat, according to sources in the senator’s office.

Cruz, who first proposed the legislation last year, seeks to strip those Americans who travel abroad to fight with IS (also known as ISIL or ISIS) of their U.S. citizenship rights and stop them from coming back stateside.

The bill, known as the Expatriate Terrorist Act (E.T.A.), tightens and updates existing regulations by which a U.S. citizen effectively renounces his or her citizenship.

Cruz said that he is filing the bill partly in response to President Obama’s Tuesday State of the Union address, which he described as “detached from reality” on the foreign policy front.

“President Obama’s approach to foreign policy refuses to acknowledge the threats our enemies pose to our national security—it is detached from reality and making the world a more dangerous place,” said Cruz, who also is releasing a new video that takes aim at Obama for misleading the nation about these threats in his annual address.

Cruz said stripping American IS fighters of their citizenship is a step toward securing the country and restoring the country’s image.

“We’ve seen the grave consequence of the Obama-Clinton-Kerry foreign policy unravel with respect to Iran, Russia, and now Yemen,” Cruz said. “These consequences are not confined to faraway lands. They directly threaten America and our allies.”

“That is why this week, I am re-filing the Expatriate Terrorist Act, which prevents Americans who have fought abroad for designated terrorist groups from returning to the United States,” he said. “I look forward to working with senators on both sides of the aisle on this and additional measures to secure our nation and restore America’s leadership in the world.”…

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact Illinois’ U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk to ask them to support S. 247, known as the Expatriate Terrorist Act.  American citizens who take an oath to a foreign terrorist organization should have their citizenship revoked.

Written by Dennis Prager

President Barack Obama declared in his recent address to the nation that “ISIL is not Islamic.”

But how does he know? On what basis did the president of the United States declare that a group of Muslims that calls itself the “Islamic State” is “not Islamic?”

Has he studied Islam and Islamic history and concluded that ISIL, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Jamaat-e-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group that slaughtered 166 people in Mumbai, most especially guests at the Taj Hotel, and that tortured to death a rabbi and his wife), the various Palestinian terrorist groups (all of which have been Muslim, even though there are many Christian Palestinians), and the Muslim terror groups in Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere are also all “not Islamic?”

Has he concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood, which won Egypt’s most open election ever, is “not Islamic?”

And what about Saudi Arabia? Is that country “not Islamic” too?

Oh, and what about Iran? Also “not Islamic?”

Isn’t that a lot of Muslims, Muslim groups, and even nations — all of whom claim Islam as their religion — to dismiss as “not Islamic?”

To be fair: These baseless generalizations about what is and what is not Islamic started with Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, who regularly announced that “Islam is a religion of peace.” And it is equally unlikely that his assertion came from a study of Islam and Islamic history.

The fact is that a study of Islamic history could not lead any fair-minded individual to conclude that all these Muslims and Islamic groups are “not Islamic.” Neither Islamic history, which, from its origins, offered vast numbers of people a choice between Islam and death, nor Islam as reflected in its greatest works would lead one to draw that conclusion.

Killing “unbelievers” has been part of — of course, not all of — Islam since its inception. Within ten years of Muhammad’s death, Muslims had conquered and violently converted whole peoples from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to Syria. Muslims have offered conquered people death or conversion since that time.

The Hindu Kush, the vast, 500-mile-long, 150-mile-wide mountain range stretching from Afghanistan to Pakistan, was populated by Hindus until the Muslim invasions beginning around the year 1000. The Persian name Hindu Kush was proudly given by Muslims. It means “Hindu-killer.” At least 60 million Hindus were killed by Muslims during the thousand years of Muslim rule. Though virtually unknown, it may be the greatest mass murder in history next to Mao’s.

The groups named above are following some dictates of the Koran.

A few of many such examples:

“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them” (8:12).

“When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy, allow them to go their way. God is forgiving and merciful” (9:5).

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth” (9:29).

There is also a different admonition in the Koran: “In matters of faith there shall be no compulsion” (2:256).

So a Muslim can also cite the Koran if he wishes to allow non-Muslims to live in peace.

The problem is that Muslim theological tradition, affirmed by many scholars, holds that later revelation to Muhammad supersedes prior revelation (a doctrine known as “abrogation”). And the Koranic verses ordering Muslims to fight and slay non-believers came after those admonishing Muslims to live with non-believers in peace and without religious compulsion.

The problem is that Muslim history, in keeping with the doctrine of abrogation, has far more often practiced the violent admonitions.

The problem is that more than 600 years after Muhammad, Ibn Khaldun, the greatest Muslim writer who ever lived, explained why Islam is the superior religion in the most highly regarded Muslim work ever written, Muqaddimah, orIntroduction to History: “In the Muslim community, the holy war is religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”

In other words, Ibn Khaldun boasts, whereas no other religion commands converting the world through force, Islam does. Was Ibn Khaldun also “not Islamic?” And so much for the president’s other claim that “no religion condones the killing of innocents.”

None of this justifies bigotry against Muslims. There are hundreds of millions of non-Islamist Muslims (an Islamist is a Muslim who seeks to impose sharia on others), including many “cultural” or secular Muslims. And individual Muslims are risking their lives every day to provide the intelligence needed to forestall terror attacks in America and elsewhere.

It is only a call to clarity amid the falsehoods coming from the president, the secretary of state, and especially the universities.

As the courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born woman who leads a worldwide effort on behalf of Muslim women and for reforming Islam, asked in a speech at Yale University this month: If Islam is a religion of peace, why is there a sword on the Saudi flag?

If the president feels he has to obfuscate for the sake of gaining Muslim allies, so be it. But the rest of us don’t have to make believe what he said is true.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His most recent book is Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

This article was originally posted at the NationalReview.com website.