Newspaper Article today

[AlanHo]

LISTEN to this: 'Make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate.'

Or then again, this: 'Believers, take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends.'

Then there is the instruction to fight against those who are not of the true faith 'until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued'.

All are direct quotations from the Koran, which Muslims believe to be the absolute word of Allah, and which cannot be altered.

If you seek even more ferocious attacks on Christianity and Judaism, you will find them in the Hadith, Islam's other great book of scripture.

Week after week in those lands where Muslims rule and Christians are a minority, the message pours out from the mosques: 'God did not have a son.'

All the central doctrines of the Christian faith are emphatically denied. Things are said about Jews and Christians, sometimes comparing them to pigs and monkeys, which would attract the attention of the Thought Police if they were uttered here.

Only recently an Afghan was threatened with death - the prescribed punishment under Sharia law for converting from Islam to Christianity.

Christians in Pakistan live in constant fear of attacks on their churches and their homes, usually following false allegations that someone has burned a Koran.

Coptic Christians in Egypt suffer a similar misery. Christian Arabs who can afford to have been emigrating by the thousands to avoid increasing persecution by their Muslim neighbours.

For years Liberals in the West have spread the myth of 'Muslim tolerance'. It does not exist and never did. Where Islam rules, other faiths must cringe in humiliated subjection.

These are facts. Is it not astonishing that this militant, angry religion, whose name means not 'Peace' but 'Submission', whose whole existence is based on the denial and rejection of its rivals, dares to get into a self righteous rage over an obscure quotation in a dull academic lecture by the head of the Roman Catholic Church?

In Islam it is still the year 1427. They have had no reformation. The more Islamic a state is, the more its women are shrouded and confined, the more its minorities are despised - and the more freedom of thought and speech are crushed.

And yet the deputy leader of Turkey's Islamist ruling party, Salih Kapusuz, attacks the Pope for having 'a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages'.

If we bow to this manufactured, hypocritical fury, then I we will already have lost one of the most important battles to face us.

While our silly leaders bleat and panic about terror threats, a far greater menace to our free societies comes from the growing power of Islam in our midst.

Much of that power results from the weak-kneed refusal of our own liberal elite to stand up for what is good about our Christian civilisation. Back the Pope.

Scanned from Mail on Sunday 17th September 2006. Page 31

[Thos]

I don't buy, or read the Mail (presumably that quote is from The Mail on Sunday rather than the Daily Mail) so I googled it to find the source of the piece you scanned, AlanHo. But I couldn't find it. Who wrote it? It is important to know the fanatics of all sides.

Thos.

[catgate]

For all the navel gazing and warped mental contortions that go on in Muslim circles they seem to have overlooked one of their primary tenets. They say "insh'allah," "If God wills it." at the drop of a hat and every verse end. However they seem to be unable to understand that their Allah, in whose name they slaughter, the most powerful thing in creation, has willed for millenia, that the Israelites should come into being and continue to exist and likewise the Christians, from whom they sprang. So it would appear that the most powerful thing in creation has no problem with other religions, because Allah must have willed their continuity. If Allah had been displeased with the pope or Salman Rushdi then he would have simply zapped them, or even changed their minds for them before they spoke, and not relied on some jumped up tin pot imam to work his followers up into a fit of the vapours.

The alternative, of course, is that the whole business of god and religion is an utter farce.

[andsome]

It is not just extreme Islamics that scare me, I am equally scared of extreme Christian fundamentalists. Over 30% of Americans believe that the words of the Bible are sacrosanct, and should be taken completely literally. Last night I watched a programme on Chanel four about all this. Evidently these people take the book of revelations as the absolute gospel truth. This evidently forecasts that the world will end with a war between Israel and the Muslim countries, but that this cannot actually occur until Israel controls every bit of land that they controlled in early Biblical times. To this end the American government got very upset when Sharon started to hand over land to the Palestinians. Many thousands of these American zealots visit Israel every year and push for absolute war with Muslims, in the belief that the believers will at a stroke all be spirited off to heaven, leaving the rest behind to face seven years of hell on earth, before we all end up eventually in hell. Here is a link to one website preaching this rubbish. CLICK HERE . If you do a Google search for Rapture Ready.com, and search also for 'Great tribulations', and also 'End timers' and 'Apocalypse', you will find some very disturbing reading. Evidently these people are traceable right up to the White House. I think we have every reason to be as scared of Christian America as we are of Islam.

These people actually want the world to end as soon as possible with this war, so that they can get to rapture in Heaven.

[catgate]

.... get to rapture in Heaven.

Perhaps the whole boiling shoud be ruptured in hell.

[AlanHo]

I don't buy, or read the Mail (presumably that quote is from The Mail on Sunday rather than the Daily Mail) so I googled it to find the source of the piece you scanned, AlanHo. But I couldn't find it. Who wrote it? It is important to know the fanatics of all sides.

Thos.

Peter Hitchens

The article was headlined "IS THIS WHAT THEY MEAN BY MUSLIM TOLERANCE"

It was not on their web site - only in the newspaper.