Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [185]
Allah drowned Pharaoh and those who were with him. Allah drowns the Pharaohs of every generation. Allah will drown the little Pharaoh, the dwarf, the Pharaoh of all times, of our time, the American President. Allah will drown America in our seas, in our skies, in our land. America will drown and all the oppressors will drown.
Oh people of Palestine, Oh people of Iraq. The crusader, Zionist America, has started an attack against our Iraq, the Iraq of Islam and Arabism, the Iraq of civilization and history. It opened a Crusader Zionist war against Iraq. If Iraq is defeated, if the nation [of Islam] is defeated in Iraq—this will be our last breath of life … It was only natural that America would invade Iraq. When Afghanistan was devoured we said that if Afghanistan would be devoured, Iraq too would be devoured and I warned that if Iraq is devoured, south Lebanon will be devoured too and Syria should also start preparing because the rest of the Arab world fell without war. This is a Zionist Crusader war. It is not I who say this, it was the little Pharaoh [Bush] who announced it when he stated that this was a Crusader attack. Hasn’t he said this?39
Faith provides the frame of reference in both Muslim and Christian maledicta. In a Saudi sermon, from which MEMRI presented selected excerpts, the preacher declared:
Today we will talk about one of the distorted religions, about a faith that deviates from the path of righteousness … about Christianity, this false faith, and about the people whom Allah described in his book as deviating from the path of righteousness. We will examine their faith, and we will review their history, full of hate, abomination, and wars against Islam and the Muslims.
In this distorted and deformed religion, to which many of the inhabitants of the earth belong, we can see how the Christians deviate greatly from the path of righteousness by talking about the concept of the Trinity. As far as they are concerned, God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: three who are one …
They see Jesus, peace be upon him, as the son of Allah … It is the Christians who believe that Jesus was crucified. According to them, he was hanged on the cross with nails pounded through his hands, and he cried, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” According to them, this was so that he would atone for the sins of mankind …
Regardless of all these deviations from the path of righteousness, it is possible to see many Muslims … who know about Christianity only what the Christians claim about love, tolerance, devoting life to serving the needy, and other distorted slogans … After all this, we still find people who promote the idea of bringing our religion and theirs closer, as if the differences were minuscule and could be eliminated by arranging all those [interreligous] conferences, whose goal is political.40
However, as we shall see, zealous Christians can be just as ignorant and insulting about Muslims.41
JIHAD HAS CHANGED ITS MEANING, AND SO TOO HAS THE TERM “CRUSADE.” As we have seen in chapter 8, from the early nineteenth century the word developed two parallel meanings. One was as the technical term to describe the “historic” Crusades in the Middle East, which had previously gone under a variety of names. The other was as a synonym for “fighting fiercely in a good cause.” Thomas Jefferson’s “crusade against ignorance” was probably the first usage in this sense.42 But this style of militancy retained a strong connection with older values, although this is less widely recognized in the West than the revival of jihad. I have found little or nothing published on the new traditions of “crusade” while there is a plethora of new books on the Muslim holy war. But the evidence and the practice of crusading today is there