If They Can Declare a Jihad, Why Can't We Call for a Crusade

It's all going to end in Armageddon anyway.

ISIS just released a statement praising the Jihadi attacks on Paris.  They were very open about the attacks being their doing as part of their jihad against "the capital of prostitution and vice and the lead carrier of the cross in Europe - Paris."  They called the killers martyrs and the murdered French, "crusaders".

Having declared war on the "Crusaders" and clearly identified these crusaders as carriers of the cross, ISIS has openly declared war. Given the history, perhaps it is time for another "Crusade" - this time against ISIS. It doesn't appear that ISIS will stop murdering innocents until we make the organization and it's "caliphate" (a powerful idea in Islamic theology) extinct.

Of course, immediately many readers will raise hell with me about the use of the term Crusades because as "everybody knows", the Crusades were an evil war perpetrated against innocent Muslims who were going about their own business and harming no one. President Bush let slip the word "Crusade" and drew almost universal condemnation from media, foreign leaders and every "progressive" on the planet. The only problem with that totally negative image of the Crusades is that, although, the Crusades were certainly used by popes and potentates in cahoots with each other for the purpose of thinning out the herds of war-like and dangerous European knights and barons by ordering them off on a religious war, the war itself had another very real and important purpose.  In the years prior to the first Crusade, Muslim jihad had swept Christian nations in North Africa and Asia Minor and even into Europe.

Charles Martel, the leader of the Frank, saw Christian European provinces falling one after another to the Muslim heavy cavalry of Abdul Rahman. Out-numbered, Martel made a stand at Tours, France. the Muslims had penetrated into west central France, not far from Paris. It was the first time infantry had ever withstood a heavy cavalry charge in Battle. In the meantime, some of Martels men sneaked behind Rahman's lines and began liberating prisoners that the Muslims were holding. The Muslim cavalry saw what was happening and thought the French were stealing their plunder and broke off the attack to save their spoils. Once the retreat began, Martel pursued them right out of the country.

People don't realize how close Europe came to becoming a vassal state of Islam. The Crusades pushed back the Muslims out of Europe, including Spain and the Balkans. The Crusades pushed the Islamic conquerors back, but even then a lot of Christian nations that had fallen were never recovered. That's about to happen again. The Armies of Islam (at least the fanatic fundamentalist side of Islam) are on the march.

Now we are told by apologists for terrorism not to worry that only a small percentage of Muslims are militant Jihadis. Let's look at the actual number for a second. Small percentages have a way of working out to a lot of actual people.  There are 1.57 billion Muslims in the world.  Of that number,
polls (even those conducted by Muslim organizations and Muslim apologists) estimate show that between 12 and 34 percent of all Muslims approve of terrorist activities. Muslim apologists generally reduce that number to a paltry 1%. Okay, lets say that only 1% of Muslims are hard-core terrorists. That means there are some 157 MILLION hard core jihadis. In an attempt to slim that number down some "authorities" reduce that number to .01% or a tenth of a percent. Even then, that works out to an intolerable 15.7 million hard core jihadis.

At the lowest estimate the apologists for terrorism can transmorgrify the actual number of fanatics into, there would still be more than 15 million jihadis out there, who thoroughly approve of making Christians and Jews an extinct species.  And that's the LOW estimate. One Muslim poll says 49% of Muslims approve of suicide bombing. That's almost 8 billion people who think terrorism is just dandy.

None of the numbers for any other terrorist groups even remotely approaches that number. Giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming, that it is the lower number, that's a whole major religious group that is dangerous and dedicated to destroying Western civilization. Anyone who thinks that's not a serious threat to all we hold dear is either living in Colorado and overdoing the hashish or have very serious case of self-loathing.


And if anybody doesn't think that big of group of people making war on Christianity isn't going to cause us to bunch up in unhealthy ways, then they don't know Satan's tactics very well. He's always got at least two things going so that whichever side wins, it's a victory for him. The good guys seldom win. Most of the time we simply escape with our hides intact if we're lucky or drop a couple of A-Bombs on the bad guys to quiet them down. The devil always manages to work things out in his favor, though and take us one step closer to the Apocalypse.

Perhaps we'll finish off ISIS on the Plain of Megiddo. Perhaps, by then, it won't matter who wins and Jesus will have to come and rescue whatever good guys are left. I shall be hunkered down waiting for him.

Tom King
© 2015





Why do we not embrace the label "Crusader"?  That's what we need right now.

Would Mohamed Approve of Mohamed's Behavior?

A knife-wielding student stabbed four people on the campus of UC Merced a couple of days ago. He was identified Thursday as 18-year-old Faisal Mohammad from Santa Clara, California. Why is it so many of these terrorist incidents are committed by people named Mohammad or some derivation thereof? Mohammad apparently never developed a standard spelling for his name.


I got called on the carpet for saying that - apparently it reveals my bigotry, but that's not what I'm trying to incite here. A guy shot another guy in Lakewood and as my friend points out, his name was "Jesse". That's not the same thing at all. In that case a disturbed soldier with some serious issues shoots one guy. Single murders happen all the time and murderers have all kinds of names ranging from Bob Johnson to John DuPont. A knife attack in a school where the guy is stabbing everyone in sight? Not so much. Just seems an awful lot of mass killers (or attempted killers) of late share a common name. Even the kid with the "clock" dressed up as a bomb, who got himself arrested, invited to the White House and then moved to Qatar - home of terrorist training central, shared that same name. 

Here are a few others, just to show you what I mean:

• Chattanooga Terrorist - Mohammed Youssef Abdulazeez
• Jihadi John (DC Sniper) - Mohammed EmwaziFirst Trade Towers bombing -  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
• Twin Towers pilot - Mohamed Atta, (surprisingly the only one named Mohammed in the bunch)
• Khobar Towers - Abdelkarim Hussein Mohammed al-Nasse along with 5 others named Mohammed
• Beltway Sniper - John Allen Muhammad
• Kenya Garrissa University - Mohamed Mohamud
• Navy Yard Shooter - Mohammed Salem
• Arkansas Recruiting Center - Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad
• Paramatta shootings - Farhad Jabar Khali Mohammad
• Nashville drive by - Mohamed Almahmmody
• Shreveport shootout with police - Mohamed Ibrahim.
• Kansas City Freeway Sniper - Mohammed Pedro Whitaker

I'm not condemning all Muslims here, but the folk involved all come from a common place. I have had good relations with my Muslim colleagues that I've worked with in the past. They are, in my experience, a peace-loving folk, so I have no experience of Muslims who chant death to America an hate us enough to blow themselves up. Still, given the rising tide of terrorist activity, I do have a problem with the fact that we as a nation are ignoring a group, whose members all share a common ethnic and religious orientation, that has declared war on us and that apparently hate us and the horse we rode in on. And I don't think it's an accident that there are an awful lot of "Mohammeds", "Abduls", "Husseins" and "Achmeds" in that group.  Might give you a hint where to look for them.

 My suggestion would be to band together with Muslims who wish to live with us in peace and declare all-out war on the forces of darkness who use that religion (or any religion) as an excuse to terrorize, murder and force others to submit to their will. I think the Muslim community would go for that. It would certainly leave a lot of empty seats in the halls of power that could be filled by honest, peace-loving Muslims. That's really the only way to do it. You have to remove the killers and give the power to honest, peaceful leaders and then you have to back them to the hilt.  You can't just pull out. Every time a terrorist organization rises up, you have to go after them with everything you're got until they are eliminated. You do that by partnering with people you know believe in peaceful coexistence. We did it in Germany and in Japan after WWII and we stood by the South Koreans after the Korean conflict. We didn't do that in Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were slaughtered when South Vietnam fell to the communists.  You can't get away with destroying your enemy and then leaving a hole in the ground. You have to stay with the job and you have to assure those who help you that you are not going to go off and abandon them.

It's time for the Muslim world to choose sides and for us to make a commitment to those that choose to be with us.
 
I do realize that a comment like mine can incite bigotry in the weak-minded and that, for that reason, I probably shouldn't point out that all those killers were named Mohammed. HOWEVER, that said, we are in a war that the president is ignoring if not abetting. It's never a good idea to pretend your enemy isn't shooting at you.

One bunch of mass murderers we've seen lately are certifiably insane, and there's plenty of talk about what to do about that. Recommendations from strict gun control to loosening the laws on committing folks with severe mental illness have been put forward. This is good. We should talk about ways to prevent severely ill people from shooting their neighbors and families.

BUT, we should, also be dealing with the second problem, which is that there are terrorists among us and they are being recruited and dispatched from specific organizations who have declared war against our country. Pretending there is no war is just stupid. These organizations occupy ground throughout the Middle East and claim to be acting as the leaders of their religion. During George W. Bush's tenure, there were no Muslim attacks on the homeland after 9/11. We took the battle to them so they had no resources to send weapons and recruits here when they were barely staying alive over there.  We did a lot of good, taking out tens of thousands of jihadis and their leaders in the process. We did not, however, finish the war. President Obama simply left Iraq. It's no accident that ISIS is now set up in Iraqi territory.  I like Ben Carson's suggestion for solving the problem - to prosecute war against these people until absolute victory is won. We go to fight a real war; not a ten year police action but an all out attack with the full might and power of the free nations of the Earth.

Also, to a person, every non Muslim mass murderer in the US in the past couple of decades I have found in my research, seems to be a registered Democrat or an avowed progressive socialist, save one notable paranoid schizophrenic whose family had been trying to get him committed for years and the government wouldn't cooperate. Perhaps we need to look at the mental stability of that group instead of training our police and military incessantly to subdue an imaginary terrorist threat from the Tea Party.

In pointing out the Mohamed thing, I'm just saying that some folk out there are making Mohamed look bad.  And in case you want to point out that the Roseberg Oregon college shooter wasn't named Mohamed, that's true. Interestingly by the way, the kid hated Christianity and lined up and shot anyone who admitted he or she was a Christian in the head. So he had that whole "kill Christians" thing in common with the Jihadis who are exterminating Christians across the Middle-East. 

The thing is there are a couple of common threads in these mass shootings that it would do us well to pay attention to and to explore with the whole problem of mass murder. If we're going to reduce the incidence of this sort of violence, we're going to need some tools besides political correctness, denial and bending over backwards not to offend anybody to address the problem.  

Gun-free zones surely aren't working.

And by the way - Mohamed, if his actions and statements in the Koran are to be believed would thoroughly approve of the actions of all those Mohameds out there engaging in terrorism. I've read it in their own book. It's true that the Koran is all about peace - peace, that is, once all us infidels are dead or have submitted to Shariah law. These guys have a different definition of peace than I do.

Tom King
(c) 2015

The Perils of Embracing Everyone Else's Stories

The stories we embrace define us.

Movies and novels in today's world have taught us that almost all disagreement must end in some sort of emotional, verbal or physical violence. Pay attention to the next book you read or (more likely) the next movie or TV show you watch. There is a fairly consistent message in the stories we tell each other in our sadly post-modern culture that says that disagreement must always end badly.  

As a result of this endlessly repeated "moral of the story", we find ourselves in a culture in which we are unable to talk to one another unless we all agree; usually with whoever has the most authoritative manner. More than anything else, I think this probably explains the Donald Trump phenomenon in this election cycle and why his supporters react so violently to anyone who opposes him within the ranks of conservatives.

If we don't agree with the leader of the group or if we're the odd man out in the consensus of opinion, we will almost inevitably find ourselves cast into outer darkness by the group or shouted down into silence. And that's the preferable result. In some discussions, you can find yourself pounded into submission with physical intimidation and/or physical violence. 

We have a really difficult time "agreeing to disagree" these days. In the days where our conversations were longer and friendships more highly valued and resilient, friends often had disagreement. In the "life sucks and then you die" social environment of the post-modern social media driven world of today, however, if someone disagrees with us, we simply block his Twitter feed and be done with him. After all we have a pool of 988 "friends" and we'll very likely find someone among those friends who will agree with us all the time - until he doesn't and we cut him off. 

Even if we say we agree to disagree, these days that's usually a signal that we are going to cut off that relationship if they ever fail to conform to our worldview again, whether we actually "agree to disagree" or not. Our stories that we share among ourselves in a culture - the ones we like and return to in our minds at least - determine how we see ourselves as part of the mob, the herd or the community. So long as we remain submissive to the herd, those narratives hold a powerful sway over us. Deviate from the herd and it becomes a lonely world very quickly.

One of the reasons Christians like me and my real best friends are such a sore thumb in today's world is that we have chosen a different set of stories - Abraham and Moses, Joseph and Jesus as opposed to Star Wars, Game of Thrones and the Walking Dead. Not that there aren't some good stories outside of Scripture, but you have to separate stories you simply hear or witness from stories you embrace at least if you want to retain your own individuality. If you accept the stories that flow into your head through the media as "what everybody knows", it does not take long before you are manipulable by leaders who are loud and authoritative. Those guys are difficult enough to resist in any case without us programming ourselves in advance to blindly follow our fellow buffalo in stampeding over the cliff.

We were once taught in our youth, the value of thinking for ourselves. One wonders what they are teaching in schools these days. I suspect it is not independent critical thinking or logic. That's a formula for creating individualists and that would be a real problem for "progressive" collectivists. The last thing those guys want are buffalo who think for themselves. A buffalo with a mind of its own can be a very dangerous beast.

Tom "Buffalo" King © 2015