Pimp of the Prophet

How Chomsky turns religious terrorists into anti-imperialist freedom fighters

By Zenobia van Dongen
In January of 2015 two French Muslim terrorists of Algerian descent, the Kouachi brothers,
murdered the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. On exiting the offices they yelled
"We have avenged the prophet!". Charlie Hebdo had angered many Muslims because it had
republished cartoons of Mohammed, who was a prophet revered by Muslims. Al Qaeda had
published a hit list of people who had supposedly committed crimes against Islam, containing the
names of the editor of Charlie Hebdo, Charb, and the names of several other people who had
published cartoons of Mohammed. Al Qaeda had also trained the killers in Yemen. Many Muslims
(but by no means all) were pleased that the staff of Charlie Hebdo had been slaughtered, because
Charlie Hebdo had insulted their prophet.

Ever since in 1989 the ayatollah Khomeini issued a decree condemning English novelist Salman
Rushdie to death for supposedly insulting Mohammed in his novel The Satanic Verses, there have
been many cases in which people in Europe and elsewhere have been threatened, attacked or
murdered because they criticized Islam or were disrespectful toward Islam in some way. The same
thing had been going on in Muslim-majority countries for centuries, but in the 1980s the wave of
Islamic radicalism called the Islamic revival washed over European shores.1 In countries where no
Muslims, or very few Muslims, live, people who criticize Islam, instead of being murdered, are called
Islamophobes by progressives and by the MSM, who are the local enforcers of sharia law when there
are no Muslims around to do the job.
In the weeks following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, many people commented on the event.
Although it was obvious that the motive for the killing was revenge because the victims had
criticized or insulted Islam, some commenters didn’t even mention the charges of blasphemy
leveled against Charlie Hebdo and attributed a completely different motive to the killings. The two
motives that these people alleged for the killings were
1. injustices committed by France and/or other western countries against Muslim-majority
countries or against 3rd world countries in general, and/or
2. injustices committed by France against its immigrant population, which is mostly Muslim.
Among the commenters was one Joseph Massad, a professor of Arab politics at Columbia
University, who published an article in Electronic Intifada2 gloating over the massacre, justifying it
implicitly by presenting it as fair retribution for French colonial misrule. However the Kouachi
brothers never invoked French colonialism. After killing Charlie Hebdo's staff, they stood on the
street in front of the Charlie Hebdo editorial offices and proclaimed that they had avenged
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_revival
2
Assimilating French Muslims, by Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 22 January 2015
https://electronicintifada.net/content/assimilating-french-muslims/14205
 2
Mohammed, in other words that what they had done was punishment for blasphemy, not for
colonial misdeeds. It is interesting to note that Electronic Intifada's main gig is the Palestinian cause.
None of the readers' letters noted that defeating Zionism in Palestine and avenging colonial misrule
by France are two different topics, so they seemed to accept the idea one of the goals of the
Palestinian struggle is to punish former colonial powers for their misdeeds. This redefinition of the
Palestinian struggle opens new perspectives. None of them seems to suspect that the actual
purpose of the Charlie Hebdo massacre was to extend sharia law to Europe.
Another commenter on the Charlie Hebdo massacre was Noam Chomsky, who discussed the Charlie
Hebdo massacre with the Massachusetts director of the ACLU Kade Crockford3. What is remarkable
about Chomsky's remarks compared to those of others who made similar claims is that Chomsky
said -- without offering the slightest evidence -- that the killers were angry at Charlie Hebdo not
because of French crimes against Muslims, but because of American crimes against Muslims:
"... what incited them [i.e. the Kouachi brothers ] to jihadism were things like Abu Ghraib and the
U.S. attack on Iraq and other events of humiliation of Muslims..."4
Curiously enough, although Saddam Hussein tortured and executed thousands of dissidents at Abu
Ghraib before 2003, Abu Ghraib is now known solely for the torture (but no executions) performed
by the US after 2003. 5 By citing Abu Ghraib as a motive for the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chomsky
implied that Charlie Hebdo was somehow complicit in American misdeeds in Iraq.
However, despite Chomsky's insinuations, Charlie Hebdo was and is a left-wing, anti-militarist and
anti-clerical publication. Because of its controversial editorial line, Charlie Hebdo has often been
sued. Since 1992 it has been sued about fifty times, an average of once every six months. The
plaintiffs have been generally extreme right-wing politicians and parties, other media and
journalists, and conservative religious associations (Catholics and Muslims). Between 1992 and 2015,
the charges were usually dismissed. It lost nine cases, principally involving defamation.6
In 1991 Charlie Hebdo opposed the United States’ first invasion of Iraq and, later in the decade,
challenged the electoral successes of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front.7 (I haven’t
discovered what its position was regarding the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, but I suspect that
Charlie Hebdo opposed it as well). Charlie Hebdo's staff members were generally supportive of the
Palestinian struggle against Israel.
The editor of Charlie Hebdo since 2009 had been Stéphane Charbonnier, known as Charb. Charb
was a long-standing supporter of the French Communist Party, which has a long tradition of
opposing French colonial wars, including those waged in Vietnam and Algeria from the 1940s to the
1960s. As a matter of fact one of the founders of the French Communist Party at the congress of
Tours in 1920 was Ho Chi Minh.8 How's that for anti-colonialism!
During the 2009 European elections and the 2010 French regional elections, he supported the Left
Front. In November 2011, on Laurent Ruquier's talk TV program On n'est pas couché [We're still
awake], he declared his support for the left-wing candidate to the 2012 presidential elections, Jean-
Luc Mélenchon.9 Mélenchon and his party have very often been accused of being reluctant to
oppose fundamentalist Islam.10

3
Town Hall on Terror. Kade Crockford of the Massachusetts ACLU and author and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, The Baffler, January 22,
2015
https://chomsky.info/town-hall-on-terror/
4
Town Hall on Terror. Kade Crockford of the Massachusetts ACLU and author and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, The Baffler, January 22,
2015
https://chomsky.info/town-hall-on-terror/
5
Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad was one of the sites where political dissidents were incarcerated during the rule of Saddam Hussein.
Thousands of these dissidents were tortured and executed. After Saddam Hussein's fall, the Abu Ghraib prison was used by American
forces in Iraq. In 2003, Abu Ghraib prison earned international notoriety for the torture and abuses by members of the United States Army
during the post-invasion period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib
6
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo
7
There Aren’t Any Moderate Muslims in France [This headline doesn’t mean what it seems to mean], by Joel Vessels, 2 Feb 2015
https://www.e-ir.info/2015/02/02/there-arent-any-moderate-muslims-in-france/
8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh#Political_education_in_France
9
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charb
10
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_M%C3%A9lenchon
 3
Chomsky continues, "Al Qaeda took responsibility for at least training some of the people who
were involved, if not for financing the operation. We don’t know if it’s true or not, but they took
responsibility. They told Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept that they were responsible. ... They also said
something really interesting. They said, I’m paraphrasing, why is it okay for you to kill our
propagandists, and we can’t kill yours?"11
Chomsky narrates several instances in which the US military attacked journalists who criticized the
US, thus framing the massacre as retaliation by Al Qaeda against journalists whose work Al Qaeda
dislikes, but without specifying that the issue was blasphemy. Chomsky carefully announces for the
record that he is in favor of unrestricted freedom of speech.
Meanwhile Kade Crockford, the director of the ACLU, was helping Noam Chomsky prove that the
Charlie Hebdo staff fully deserved to be slaughtered. An interesting perspective on civil liberties.
Chomsky: Routinely, the United States goes after what it calls propaganda agencies and
destroys them. ...
Crockford: And the U.S. killed Al Jazeera journalists in Iraq as well.
Chomsky: Exactly.
There is no obvious reason why a French publication should be blamed for American misdeeds,
especially since France refused to assist the US in invading Iraq in 2003, which is when the Abu
Ghraib episode happened.12 France is an independent country and has often criticized the US.
But if Noam Chomsky blames Charlie Hebdo for the crimes of US imperialism, Noam Chomsky's
responsibility is far greater then that of Charlie Hebdo, since unlike Charlie Hebdo, Noam Chomsky
has been on the Pentagon's payroll for decades. As revealed by Ivan Segré, in 1956 Noam Chomsky
published Syntactic Structures, a book directly applicable to war, since it serves for creating and
deciphering codes. In the preface Chomsky listed the institutions that had funded his research,
including the U.S. Army (Signal Corps), the U.S. Air Force (Office of Scientific Research, Air Research
and Development Command) and the U.S. Navy (Office of Naval Research). In 1953 the CIA
overthrew the progressive government of Mossadegh in Iran, and in 1954 it overthrew that of
Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Chomsky continued working for the Pentagon in subsequent decades.
Therefore it would seem that Chomsky is a cog in the war-making machinery of US imperialism,13
and consequently is, by the standards that he himself formulates, far more deserving of summary
execution at the hands of Al Qaeda operatives than were the journalists of Charlie Hebdo.
Noam Chomsky suggests that the Kouachi brothers' motive was their anger because of Abu Ghraib.
I wonder where he got that information, because I made a thorough web search for the Kouachi
brothers in both English and French, and I found about a dozen news items and commentaries about
them. I read the French Wikipedia article on the Kouachi brothers, and I searched the CCIF
(Association for combating Islamophobia) and PIR (Indigenous Party) websites, where I expected an
exhaustive account of how much they had been humiliated by Abu Ghraib and other American
exactions. At the CCIF I found only one item containing a passing mention of the Kouachis, but
nothing about their motives. At PIR14 I found 6 articles, not counting the translations into English,
Spanish and Portuguese of the French originals. The six articles that mentioned the word "Kouachi"
were full of the hollow racist hate-mongering that characterizes the PIR, whose declared goal is to
replace the class struggle with a racial struggle and abolish human rights, as shown by these quotes
from a speech by the PIR's leader Houria Boutledja:
"There are only a few decolonial movements in Europe. The populations descending from
the colonial empire, currently discriminated in Europe and consequently the most qualified
to lead this project, are not strongly and autonomously organized. The European political
field is structured around the class divide. That means that our allies don’t really exist yet."

11
Town Hall on Terror. Kade Crockford of the Massachusetts ACLU and author and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, The Baffler, January
22, 2015
https://chomsky.info/town-hall-on-terror/
12
France and Germany unite against Iraq war, by The Guardian staff and agencies, The Guardian, Wed 22 Jan 2003
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/22/germany.france
13
Israël : L'impossible boycott - par Ivan Segré, Lundi Matin #80, 9 novembre 2016
https://lundi.am/Israel-l-impossible-boycott
14
http://indigenes-republique.fr/?s=kouachi
 4
" ... the decolonial person is the one that has defeated his or her fascination for the White
Man, and for the Western civilization"
"We must resist the ideology of White universalism, human rights and the Enlightenment,
progress ..."15
This is typical for the articles published by the PIR on Charlie Hebdo massacre:
"The lethal attack by the Kouachi brothers on January 7, 2015 against the journalists of
Charlie Hebdo rocked the whole of France. On the following days - January 8 and 9 - Amédy
Coulibaly in turn killed five people, including four Jews in a kosher hypermarket. These three
indigenes were French citizens. They were born in this country, grew up here and went to
school here. It was in this country, in the depths of this Republic, of its system of justice, its
institutions and its proclaimed values that they were educated. And it was here, in the womb
of their stepmother Marianne [symbol of France], that they died riddled by police bullets.
...
They lived in a postcolonial world in which day after day a balance of power is asserted: the
West dominates, colonizes, humiliates and slaughters the peoples of the Third World with
which they naturally identified. Given such a situation, who would dare to blame high school
students with an immigrant background for spontaneously siding with "their own", with the
colonized, the bombed, the massacred peoples? If some of these students go so far as to
claim greater solidarity with the Kouachi brothers than with "Charlie", at the risk of being
dragged before a judge for their remarks, it is because the national and international context
in which they grew up places "Charlie" on the side of the oppressor, on the side of the
powerful, on the side of the devastating West which is striking the Arab and Muslim world,
which is also their world. They are not to blame for this context, but they suffer under even
as they struggle to see it crumble on top of all those who have an interest in it enduring, and
who are determined to silence them."16
Just like Noam Chomsky, this self-styled "indigenous" teacher insists on colonial crimes, claiming
that the Kouachi brothers "naturally identified" with "peoples of the Third World". But the only
evidence we have of their motives has nothing to do with "peoples of the Third World". They
themselves proclaimed that they had killed the Charlie Hebdo journalists to avenge the prophet.
Mohammed is a cult figure to only a minority of the peoples of the so-called 3rd world. Actually most
peoples of the 3rd world, including many Mohammedans, fear Islam and wouldn't move a finger to
avenge Mohammed's honor. Therefore this sleazy character is using the term "3rd world" in order to
avoid revealing that it was a purely religious crime.
Of the six article on the PIR website, only one of them -- written by Houria Boutledja herself --
mentioned the Kouachi brothers' motivation for killing the Charlie Hebdo journalists:
Those are the dead ends of the racial system that drive the victims to offer flowers, to make
inventive lists or that creates the likes of Mohamed Merah, Coulibaly and the Kouachi
brothers. Nor do we understate our own blame. We are aware that if the Kouachi brothers
wished to avenge the prophet of Islam, ‘alayhi salat wa salam
(‫ة وا م‬ ‫ا‬ ), it was because we are still too few in number and too unorganized to
defend the rite of the damned of the earth, we know that if Coulibaly killed Jews, it is
because we are not sufficiently organized to offer a credible alternative to the state-imposed
hierarchy of ethnic groups in France that creates competition among them, a phenomenon
that deserves to be called a pro-Semitic government policy [philosémitisme], and in order to
defend the Palestinians against the Zionist movement in France.17

15
Decolonizing Europe, by Houria Bouteldja, spokesperson of the PIR.
https://decolonialityeurope.wixsite.com/decoloniality#!Decolonising%20Europe/c48f
16
Affaire Charlie Hebdo : la résistance des élèves indigènes [The Charlie Hebdo case: Resistance by indigenous students] , by Soliman Ibn
Hany, an indigenous teacher, 13 February 2015
http://indigenes-republique.fr/affaire-charlie-hebdo-la-resistance-des-eleves-indigenes/
17
Discours d’ouverture lors du 10ème anniversaire du PIR « Qu’adviendra-t-il de toute cette beauté ? » [Opening Speech at the 10th
Anniversary of the Party of the Indigenes of the Republic (PIR) "What will become of all this beauty?"] by Houria Bouteldja, 16 May 2015
http://indigenes-republique.fr/quadviendra-t-il-de-toute-cette-beaute-2/
 5
When Charlie Hebdo reprinted the caricatures of Mohammed from the Danish Jyllands-Posten in
2006, strong and sometimes violent responses came from Muslim countries. Several French Muslim
associations sued Charlie Hebdo in court for "public defamation of a group of people because of
their religion”. The lawsuit was dismissed. In 2007, the publication of the issue featuring the
cartoons of Muhammad enabled the magazine to make a profit of almost one million euros.

On 1 November 2011, during the Arab Spring, Charlie Hebdo announced that the next day it would
publish a special joke issue designed specially to "celebrate the electoral victory" of the Islamist
Ennahdha party in Tunisia. For that date only, its name Charlie Hebdo was changed to "Charia
Hebdo" ["Sharia Hebdo"] and Mohammed was named as editor in chief.
That very night a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the premises of the magazine and considerable
fire damage ensued. At the same time the magazine's website was hacked, and its home page was
replaced with a photo of Mecca and verses from the Koran.
Following the fire, a group of twenty signatories including journalist Rokhaya Diallo, so-called
"indigenous" activist Houria Bouteldja and sociologists Christine Delphy and Sylvie Tissot published
an article entitled "We defend freedom of expression but we do not support Charlie Hebdo!"18.
The authors complained that Charb was in league with president Sarkozy's minister of the interior
Claude Guéant19. This claim was based on a visit that Guéant made to the editorial offices after the
fire, and was gratuitous slander intended to depict Charlie Hebdo as a tool of the government. They
claimed that Charb and Guéant were supported by big business and big media, were clowning
around in a self-seeking way and using something or other (they didn’t explain what) as a tool
[instrumentalisation] in order to infect people's minds with the ideas of Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen,
who had succeeded her father Jean-Marie Le Pen at the congress of the right-wing National Front
held in at Tours in January of that year20. The authors stated that people shouldn’t sympathize with
the journalists of Charlie Hebdo, since the insurance would pay for the damage. They claimed that,
contrary to majority opinion, a mere arson attack would not have any meaningful effect and would
not endanger free speech. Instead the threat to free speech came from the policy of the "national-
secular state" that was resisting the wearing of headscarves and punishing those who defaced the
symbols of the French Republic.21
This kind of crazy talk is typical for the neo-racist PIR.
After the fire, the Charlie Hebdo staff worked for two months on the premises of the left-wing daily
Libération, before moving to new premises in the 20th arrondissement of Paris.
In 2012 Stéphane Charbonnier received death threats after publishing caricatures of the Prophet
Muhammad. Charb, who was living under police protection, said in reply: "It may sound a bit
pompous to say so, but I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees." In 2013, Inspire, the online

18
http://indigenes-republique.fr/pour-la-defense-de-la-liberte-dexpression-contre-le-soutien-a-charlie-hebdo/
19
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Gu%C3%A9ant#
20
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rassemblement_national#Pr%C3%A9sidence_de_Marine_Le_Pen
21
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo
 6
magazine published by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, included his name on a list of
blasphemers whom it accused of "crimes against Islam".22

Chomsky said that the killers were resentful at the treatment received by Muslims in France. It is
true that many Muslims are underprivileged in France and often discriminated against. But neither
he nor any other commenter has provided the slightest shred of evidence for any hardship suffered
by Muslims in France, let alone hardship suffered by the Kouachi brothers or by their family, their
friends or their neighbors. I find such general whining very unpersuasive. The fact that not a single
one of these whiners bothered to unearth any information at all on the life of the Kouachi brothers
shows that for these people evidence means nothing.
Since Chomsky doesn’t pay much attention to facts, he improvises oppression. Note how vague his
descriptions are, and how little they resemble what can be seen in the adjoining images.
Chomsky: "... events of humiliation of Muslims and violence against them, not to speak of the
conditions in the suburbs of Paris, where they’re subjected to contempt and harsh repression while
they try to survive. ... Go to the banlieues, the suburbs of Paris, where it’s mostly North Africans, and
the conditions are pretty awful. I’ve seen worse poverty, but they’re pretty bad. But the worst thing,
the thing that people complain about, is the utter contempt that is felt toward them by those rich
guys in Paris an hour away, and the way they’re treated if they dare to get into Paris. You have to
live with this constant assault on your dignity and your personal rights. There’s plenty of violence
and repression, too. Unemployment, no hope, imprisonment—well, out of that comes crime, what
we call crime. But it has roots."23

I made a thorough review of the records available online in French, paying special attention to
Islamist websites, and I was unable to find a single claim of discrimination, hardship or mistreatment
of either one of the Kouachi brothers. As a matter of fact I discovered that they had been rescued by

22
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charb
23
Town Hall on Terror. Kade Crockford of the Massachusetts ACLU and author and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, The Baffler, January
22, 2015
https://chomsky.info/town-hall-on-terror/
 7
the French state from a broken home and placed in an elegant orphanage located in a picturesque
town in southern France, where they attended school and obtained vocational training, all for free.
In addition I located their home in Paris, the orphanage and the vocational school of one of them,
saw images of the buildings in question on Google Maps and copied the images, which I reproduce
here, and I checked the website of the orphanage, and all of them give an excellent impression.

Moreover, on Google Maps I have examined the most crime-ridden districts in France, and to my
amazement, they all look spotless. Above is a typical image of La Grande Borgne, the crime capital
of the Ile de France region.
In November 2004, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh24 was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri25,
a Moroccan-Dutch jihadi, in retaliation for a film called Submission26 that van Gogh had made
together with the Somali apostate Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The soundtrack of Submission consists of verses
of the Quran recited by a professional Quran reciter from Egypt, and the images are female bodies
onto which the verses are projected. Submission created a great scandal among devout Muslims
because it was deemed blasphemous. Bouyeri murdered van Gogh to punish him for this alleged
blasphemy. The Dutch police discovered that Bouyeri belonged to a jihadi group that was plotting
further terrorist outrages. The police labeled it the “Hofstad group27”.
A scholarly study made of this group concluded that "No support is found for the frequently
encountered argument that discrimination and exclusion drive involvement in European
homegrown jihadism. Instead, geopolitical grievances were prime drivers of this process."28
This is applicable to most or all jihadi terrorist groups. Material hardship may be a contributing
factor, but the essential element is Muslim identity. After all, in most European countries Gypsies
are far poorer than most Muslims, but until now there have been no Gypsy terrorist attacks.

24
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Gogh_(film_director)
25
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Bouyeri
26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submission_(2004_film)
27
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstad_Network
28
Structural influences on involvement in European homegrown jihadism: A case study, by Bart Schuurman, Edwin Bakker & Quirine
Eijkman, Terrorism and Political Violence
ISSN: 0954-6553 (Print) 1556-1836 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ftpv20
 8
What is remarkable is that so many commentators, including Chomsky, studiously ignore the
obvious fact that the attack on Charlie Hebdo, like the murder of van Gogh, was inspired first and
foremost by the will to punish blasphemers, i.e. people who had insulted the frogpit, I mean the
prophet. After all, since the Rushdie affair in 1989, these attacks on blasphemers have become
routine, and they occur in countries, like Japan, that had never sent military forces to the Middle
East. In 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, was
murdered in his office in Japan, presumably in fulfillment of the Iranian fatwa ordering the death of
Rushdie and of anyone associated with publication of his novel.29 The names of the most prominent
victims of persecution for criticizing Islam are Kurt Westergaard, Lars Vilk, Molly Norris, Salman
Rushdie, Theo van Gogh, Robert Redeker, Carsten Juste, Flemming Rose, Charb, Mila, Geert
Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Seyran Ateş, Samad Abdel Hamad, Tasleema Nasreen, Hassen
Chalghoumi, Farag Foda, Salman Taseer and Asia Bibi. But there are thousands more whom we
never hear about. Those who have not been murdered owe their lives to their round-the-clock
bodyguards. Seyran Ateş, the female German-Turkish imam of a liberal Berlin mosque, has as many
bodyguards as the German minister of defense.
So Chomsky laboriously concocts a motivation that simply does not fit the facts, while carefully
avoiding the slightest mention of any clue pointing to what was obviously the true motive, namely
punishment for blasphemy, as the Kouachi brothers themselves announced right after the killing.
You can clearly hear them say so on the video. Chomsky mentions in passing that Al Qaeda trained
the killers, but he doesn’t mention why. And the reason why is that Al Qaeda wanted the editor of
Charlie Hebdo executed for blasphemy.
All this weaseling on Chomsky's part clearly shows that he wants to conceal the religious motive
behind Islamic terrorism by depicting it as righteous anger caused by injustice. But actually, even if
their anger had been aroused by the Abu Ghraib excesses of the US army, it wouldn’t really have
been anger caused by injustice, but anger caused by religion, because if the same injustice had been
visited on non-Muslims, the Kouachi brothers wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. And if the same
injustice had been perpetrated by a Muslim, they would have shrugged it off. Only wrongs suffered
by Muslims at the hands of non-Muslims are capable of arousing deep-seated anger. As a matter of
fact we seldom hear of injustices done to non-Muslims, especially when non-Muslims are oppressed
by Muslims. Such events are seldom considered newsworthy.
As a matter of fact one of the favorite hobbies of the western left consists in denying that violence
committed by Muslims has any religious motive. This is merely one aspect of a general reluctance to
admit that Islam has any tendency toward violence at all. Perhaps that is the reason why left-wing
media never discuss the Qur’an, or the life of Mohammed, or Islamic law, or everyday life in Muslim-
majority countries, since it is difficult to discuss any of those topics without stumbling across
instances of egregious violence, especially violence against those who have inconvenient ideas or
who breach any one of the numerous taboos that characterize Islam.
However it is a matter of record that Islam is a violent religion, indeed the most violent religion of all,
at least at the present time. The head of the largest Muslim organization in the world said so
himself. Straight from the horse's mouth.

Yahya Cholil Staquf, general secretary of the Nahdlatul Ulama, which, with about 50 million
members, is the world’s biggest Muslim organization, says "Western politicians should stop
pretending that extremism and terrorism have nothing to do with Islam. There is a clear relationship
29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitoshi_Igarashi
 9
between fundamentalism, terrorism, and the basic assumptions of Islamic orthodoxy. ... So long as
we lack consensus regarding this matter, we cannot gain victory over fundamentalist violence within
Islam.… Within the classical tradition, the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is
assumed to be one of segregation and enmity. ... I’m not saying that Islam is the only factor causing
Muslim minorities in the West to lead a segregated existence, often isolated from society as a whole.
There may be other factors on the part of the host nations, such as racism, which exists everywhere
in the world. But traditional Islam — which fosters an attitude of segregation and enmity toward
non-Muslims — is an important factor."30

30
In interview, top Indonesian Muslim scholar says stop pretending that orthodox Islam and violence aren't linked, by Marco Stahlhut,
Time magazine, September 8, 2017
http://time.com/4930742/islam-terrorism-islamophobia-violence/