Exploding The Myth That Islam Is An Abrahamic Religion
The Gods of Political Correctness dictate that all religions are of equal worth; that there are “…three great Abrahamic religions,” and “The Arabs are Semites too, so they can’t be anti-Semites.” All three of these sacred cow clichés need to be slaughtered on the altar of truth.
While Christianity and Islam are both offshoots of the Jews and took from them the concept of having one’s own holy writ, their self-definitions as new faith communities were radically different. The Koine Greek language narratives that Christians append to their version of the Hebrew Bible purport to be a continuation of Jewish history. The Catholic Church even defines itself in Latin as Verus Israel, the True Israel.
But Muslims do not claim this. On the contrary, the Koran plagiarized many of the stories in the Hebrew Bible but always with changes, and when a Muslim is asked to explain the different versions of the same stories, he will say the Jews stole them from Islam.
When asked to explain how this theft happened since the former text came into the world in the year 1313 BCE at Mt. Sinai and the latter over 2,000 years later, in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, the Muslims say that Musa (the Arabic mispronunciation of the Hebrew name Mosheh) brought the Koran down from Mt. Sinai—not the Torah as the Jews believe. And then, down below, the evil Jews snatched it away from Musa and re-wrote it and called it their Torah. When Muhammad came along, he restored the original text, today’s Koran.
Image: Abraham sending away Hagar and Ishmael by Georg Pencz. Public domain.
In Islam’s universe, the Jews’ Torah is a stolen, plagiarized version of Muslim scripture—which resonates with the contemporary charge that the Jews also allegedly stole Filistin (i.e., Palestine) from the indigenous, putatively primeval Palestinian people.
As for the cliché that Islam is an Abrahamic religion, this is a head-on collision with the Biblical text. The greatest authority on what is Abrahamic was Abraham himself, who accepted that he had to expel his first-born son Ishmael from his family, community, and country because he was not at all “Abrahamic,” like his father.
To Jews, Abraham was the kindest man in the world, which is probably why God chose him. For the religious revolution that Abraham ignited (ethical monotheism) was not only the concept of one God but a kind God—versus the capricious, cruel, and often immoral gods in pagan pantheons.
Islam is not Abrahamic because Ishmael was, as the Bible prophesies, a “wild ass of a man,” a normal physical male but with the spirit of an undomesticated jackass. And indeed, the behavior of Muslims throughout history and certainly in our time reveals them not to be the progeny of a kind man, for they are masters of cruelty, being head-choppers, mutilators, and skyjackers, with a particular appetite for raping and the satanic torture of women.
Their Allah smiles on mass murder and no less the glorious sacrifice of oneself, viz. suicide. Islamists are totalitarians who license themselves to murder anyone who ridicules their idea of a prophet, with the very idea of a prophet also pilfered by them from the Jews.
As for the cliche that Arabs are Semites, no, they are Hamites. Yes, Muhammad was an Arab descended from Ishmael, one of Abraham’s eight biological sons, but Judaism also makes clear that Ishmael was not his father’s spiritual heir. Ishmael is expelled (Genesis 21:9) from his father’s Promised Land for his antediluvian propensity for violence. His expulsion at age sixteen came about when he jealously mocked his little half-brother Isaac at the latter’s weaning party. Then, Isaac’s onlooking wise and perceptive mother, the Matriarch Sarah, who had watched Ishmael grow up, realized he was capable of murdering her son after her aged husband’s passing. For that, he had to go.
Abraham and Sarah were also descendants of Shem, son of Noah (whence the word “Semite”), but Ishmael was not. While many nations hold that a son inherits his nationality from his father, the Jews do not. For them, it passes through the mother. Thus, because Ishmael’s mother, Hagar, was an Egyptian, and Egypt was one of the four sons of Noah’s other son Ham (Genesis 9), his mother was Hamitic.
The Bible also records (21:21) that she found for her son a wife, an Egyptian like herself, which only compounds the evidence that Ishmael’s progeny are Hamites, not Semites.
And who was Ham? Noah’s “problem child,” arguably the first sex criminal in history for disrespecting his father’s nakedness. Indeed, to this day, sexually speaking, an abyss separates Judeo-Christian society from Islam, and that is most apparent in the Judeo-Christian insistence on monogamy versus Islam’s polygamy. It is part of the Western respect for women versus Islam’s abuse of them. (Feminists in the West can complain all they want about men, but compared to the life of women in Islam, they are living in paradise.)
Osama bin Ladin’s father sired children with fifty-six separate women. Ibn Saud, the tribal chieftain who founded the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where bin Laden grew up, produced today’s four thousand princes who monopolize that country’s wealth and vie among themselves for power. Polygamy famously leads to rivalry between wives, between half-brothers, and between mothers fighting for their sons. One could make the case that Islam’s attitudes toward women are at the root of its many social pathologies, which is yet another reason it does not belong in America.
America has defiantly rejected polygamy as antithetical to core constitutional values. We know this because of the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons. Founded in upstate New York in the 1830s, the new community resurrected polygamy, and, for this, the Mormons were driven from town to town, often violently.
In the 1840s, Mormons fled to the far west and established themselves at a great salt lake even before Congress created the Utah Territory in 1850. Their community grew and, after reaching the legal requirement in population necessary for statehood, they petitioned Congress for that status. Congress refused because of the Mormon’s sexual behavior.
Over the next Biblical generation of forty years, the Mormons repeatedly asked for statehood and were repeatedly denied until, in 1890, they outlawed polygamy, and Utah finally joined the Union in 1896.
To this day, polygamy remains illegal in all fifty states, and as such, every mosque in the country that promotes polygamy is arguably an illegal operation and should be shut down. Concerned citizens might advise the proper authorities about the presence in their jurisdiction of such an institution fostering the practice. Sheriffs and marshals armed with court orders could be dispatched to padlock them as they do a “crack house” or house of ill repute.
In Colonial India, the British Raj put a stop to suttee, the practice of surviving widows being burnt to death alongside their dead husbands, and the Brits did so in the conviction that, no, not all religions are of equal worth as the Gods of Political Correctness dictate.
General Douglas MacArthur, likewise, when he became governor of post-war Japan, reformed the Shinto religion by stripping the emperor of his divine status.
American culture enshrines Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death,” the Statue of Liberty in New York, and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia engraved with the Bible’s Hebrew phrase marking the Jubilee Year, “Proclaim liberty throughout the Land.” The first American rebels against the King called themselves The Sons of Liberty.
By contrast, Islam is no friend of liberty. It means “submission,” and when a Muslim prays, he assumes the position of a slave, face to the floor. There are fifty-six officially Muslim states, virtually all of them dictatorships, and not one is a liberal democracy that any red-blooded American man or woman would want to live in.
Islam does not belong in America and should be outlawed. At least until it reforms itself.
Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s Phantom Nation: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.