FYI.
– ISIS: Christians are pagan ‘cross worshippers’:
Islamic State says Jesus a ‘slave of Allah’
ISIS is using the latest issue of its online magazine to portray Christianity as a “false” religion and to encourage Muslims to launch more attacks on churches like the one carried out in France last week, Islam experts say.
In the French attack, two ISIS terrorists entered a Catholic church in Normandy and slit the throat of the elderly priest on the altar while he was saying mass. A nun was also critically injured in the attack for which ISIS claimed credit.
In the foreword to its magazine, called Dabiq, ISIS starts by damning Christians as “cross worshipers,” pagans and idolaters because of their belief in the Holy Trinity. It says Jesus Christ himself was a “slave to Allah” who will return in the last days to wage jihad and “break the crosses.”
“This is not extremist or radical or novel to ISIS but is part-and-parcel of Islamic theology and propaganda going back to its earliest days,” said Timothy Furnish, Ph.D., a historian specializing in Islam and author of three books including “Sects, Lies and the Caliphate: 10 Years of Observations on Islam.”
Philip Haney, a retired Homeland Security officer and co-author of the bestseller “See Something, Say Nothing,” said the call to “break the cross” is also not new or unique to ISIS. It is embedded in the Islamic texts and taught throughout mainstream Islam.
“In March of 2012 a furious mob desecrated dozens of Commonwealth War Graves in a Libyan cemetery amid continuing fury in the Middle East over the burning of the Koran by U.S. soldiers,” Haney said, adding:
“In fact, the practice of cross-destruction goes back to the life and example of Muhammad. As reported in the Hadith by Al-Waqidi, Muhammad stated that whenever he found an object in his house with the mark of a cross on it, he would destroy it.” (Also see W. Muir, The Life of Muhammad, Volume 3, P.61, note 47).
The most well-known Hadith making reference to the cross was narrated Abu Huraira, who predicted the ultimate cross breaker would be the returning Isa, the Muslim Jesus:
“Allah’s Apostle said, ‘By Him in Whose Hands my soul is, surely [Jesus,] the son of Mary will soon descend amongst you and will judge mankind justly [as a Just Ruler]; he will break the cross and kill the pigs and there will be no Jizya [i.e. no taxation taken from non-Muslims: because they will all be forced to convert to Islam].’” (Hadith of Sahih Al-Bukhari, Book 46, Hadith 37)
Furnish, author of the blog MahdiWatch.org, notes that in a section of Dabiq called the “Response to the Call of the Prophet” ISIS includes historical data, at least as recalled in Islamic tradition, about “good” and “bad” Christian rulers. The king of Ethiopia in the 7th century A.D., who protected renegade Muslims by allegedly agreeing that their new prophet was legitimate, is the “good” ruler.
The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius and the head of the Coptic church, who rejected the validity of Islam and remained staunchly Christian, are held up as examples of “bad” Christians.
The “good Christian” versus “bad Christian” setup continues to this day. The Barack Obamas and Hillary Clintons, who protect Islam from criticism, are the “good Christians” in the eyes of the Islamists, said former Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.
“The Obama administration, Hillary Clinton, and to some extent the Bush administration all insisted on mandating within our U.S. government, as official U.S. policy, a fantasy view of Islam,” Bachmann told WND. “They created a never-before proclaimed doctrine, inconsistent with historical fact, insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, despite millennia of carnage, theft, kidnappings, rape, fraud and murders left in the wake of an Islam on offense.”
Even the father of a fallen Marine hero, Khizr Kahn, who spoke last week at the Democratic National Convention, reiterated the false, tiresome propaganda line that “Islam has nothing to do with terrorism,” Bachmann said.
“Again, this declaration is false as Muslim scholars boastfully proclaim, both in Islamic literature and in weekly lectures from mosques, and in Islamic recruitment videos,” she said.
“The recently published issue of the Islamic State’s terror magazine should put the lie of a peaceful Islam to rest forever,” Bachmann added. “Muhammad’s words and actions all advocated violence and terror to advance the expansion of Islam. Conquering by the sword was his practice, and is the way of ISIS today.
“The Obama/Hillary view of peaceful Islam is getting innocent people killed nearly daily across the world.”
The Dabiq cover story, “Break the Cross,” includes 18 pages of “standard-issue, long-since-discredited Islamic apologetics comparing the Quran to the Bible and attempting to argue that the latter was changed to reflect the Trinity and Jesus’ resurrection, among other theological points.
“Again, this is striking in how mainstream Muslim, not extremist, it is,” Furnish said in an email to WND.
“Dabiq 15 simply spells out in much more detail what ISIS has been saying piecemeal for two years: that literalist Islam’s major beef is with Christianity and Christians,” Furnish said. “This follows logically from 14 centuries of Islamic apologetics vis-a-vis Christianity.
“Thus, ISIS does not differ from mainstream Sunni Islam at all in its critique of Christianity as a false religion and its adherents as deluded,” Furnish added. “It really only differs in that ISIS resurrects the traditional Islam application of violent jihad to us Christians who refused to submit or convert.”
Only secondarily does ISIS point out that it attacks the West because of liberal/secular/atheist policies such as the homosexual agenda, Furnish said.
“It’s simply the resurrection of traditional Islamic jihad against those Christians who refuse to convert or submit.”
Swedish priest: Islam has ‘declared war’ on Christianity
Meanwhile, a priest in Sweden’s largest Christian denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran national church, has stated publicly that Islamists have declared war on Christianity and it’s time for churches to “wake up” or face more attacks like the one in France.
Annika Borg wrote an op-ed for Sydsvenskan in which she lamented Sweden’s reaction to last week’s murder of a Catholic priest in France by Islamists, asking why churches were silent on the issue.
“The genocide of Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East” has been largely ignored for years, Borg states, but now that Father Jacques Hamel was slaughtered like an animal on the altar of his own church, the war Islam has declared on Christianity is likely to hit closer to home. Ignoring it becomes more difficult now.
His murder “removes any doubt about the bloody declaration of war directed against Christianity on European soil,” by Islamists, she writes.
“What is it you do not understand? What is it you do not see and do not hear?” Borg concludes.
Borg also makes reference to Sweden’s incredibly stifling political environment under which prominent politicians have been charged with hate crimes merely for drawing attention to the negative aspects of Islam.
She noted that anyone who would have warned about the threat of Islamists targeting Christians in their own churches in Europe before it happened would have been labeled a xenophobe or Islamophobe.
Dabiq also reports on the “Words of Sincere Advice” from an American Christian convert to Islam as well as another convert from Finland and yet another from Canada. This section includes the usual litany of woes brought about by democracy, the false religion of Christianity, and the legacy of atheism, homosexuality and other sins being tolerated within Western Christian societies.
In a section called “Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You,” ISIS talks about attacks on the “sodomite, Crusader nightclub” in Orlando.
“ISIS hates us because of, a) our disbelief (in Islam); b) our secularism and liberalism; 3) our atheist ‘fringe;’ 4) our ‘crimes against Islam;’ 5) our ‘crimes against Muslims’ to include drone attacks; and 6) our ‘invasions’ of Islamic lands,’” Furnish said.
“Our only way out is to convert to Islam, pay them the jizya or tribute tax for the right to continue practicing Christianity or – as a last means of fleeting respite – a temporary truce or ‘hudnah,’” Furnish said.
A hudnah would only last at most for 10 years.
“Again, these reasons mix many historical Muslim grievances against the West and Christendom with more novel ones. The old division of the world into Dar al-Islam (house of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (house of war) holds, but this selective memory of history would maintain that, for example, the West must give back Jerusalem and al-Andalus but the Muslims are allowed to keep Constantinople/Istanbul. And this grievance-industrial complex fails to explain why Muhammad and the early caliphs, as well as the Ottoman sultans and others, attacked Christians who were not bothering or invading them at all.”
Should churches hire security guards?
“The magazine puts forward a dual approach,” John Guandolo, former FBI counter-terrorism specialist and now private consultant, told WND. “On the one hand, ISIS calls on the population of Europe to ‘abandon their infidelity and accept Islam, the religion of sincerity and submission to the Lord of the heavens and the earth.’
“On the other hand, they threaten continual warfare against those who do not, saying, ‘We call you to reflect on these questions as the bloodthirsty knights of the Caliphate continue to wage their war of just terror against you.’”
Guandolo said churches may opt to hire armed security guards. But he advises something different.
“No, use real men who are members of the church,” he said. “If they cannot find any men in the church who know how to use weapons, they should close their doors.”
What is written in Dabiq magazine is Islamic doctrine, straight from the Quran and the words/deeds of the prophet Muhammad, Guandolo said. “And the sooner the West pulls its collective head out of its backside the sooner the West can get to war with the Islamic armies and defeat them.”
Bachmann agrees.
“To defeat this blood-soaked, racist, death worshiping cult, our government needs to wake up, repudiate its wrong view of Islam, quit praising it, then actively begin a counter ideological campaign to defeat this doctrine of demons whose aim is the annihilation of Israel, (the Jewish state) and of Western Christendom.
“Our government officials should read and study what these fiends really believe, not what Obama pretends they believe. Start there.”
H/t reader kevin a.
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