Proofs that Islam should be outlawed — that is, if the West was actually serious about its own laws — continue to pile up.
In a recent article, we saw that, according to the UN’s own definitions of hate speech, the Koran should be banned not just for routinely hating others by name — Christians, Jews, polytheists, and “infidels” (kuffar) of every stripe — but openly calling for overt violence against them.
As it happens, Islam is also inherently genocidal — again, according to the UN’s own definition:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
With the exception of “d,” all of these acts have been and continue to be part of Islam’s modus operandi. In the name of jihad, Muslims have killed and injured millions of non-Muslims over the centuries (“a” and “b”). And they have most certainly “forcibly transferred” (“e”) the children of non-Muslims for their own use (entire institutions were dedicated to transforming enslaved non-Muslim boys into Muslim crack troops — think janissaries, mamelukes, etc. — to say nothing of all the captured children sold on the slave markets or sent to harems). Indeed, to this day, jihadist groups still abduct non-Muslim children and turn them into “cubs of the caliphate.”
But it is arguably “c” that most underscores Islam’s genocidal nature: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Conditional Acceptance
The word “conditions” is quite apropos: Islam’s treatment of religious minorities is heavily based on a document called The Conditions of Omar (see here for my translation). Named after history’s second caliph, Omar bin al-Khattab (r. 634 to 644), the Conditions was purportedly agreed upon between that caliph and a group of conquered Christians (possibly of Jerusalem, when it fell to Islam in 637). It stipulated the conditions by which conquered non-Muslims needed to abide in order to be tolerated and not killed.
Thus, as Koran 9:29 commands Muslims to fight the “People of the Book” (namely, Christians and Jews) until they either convert or “pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued,” the Conditions of Omar lays out in precise detail how they are to feel themselves subdued.
Christians were banned from building or repairing churches, displaying Bibles or crosses, ringing bells, or praying loud enough for Muslims to hear them. (These bans and variations on them are still alive and well in many, if not most, Muslim nations). Nor could Christians in any way make their religion attractive to — and certainly never proselytize — Muslims. (An 80-year-old Christian man was recently sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in Iran in part for distributing “Christian publications with the aim of attracting Muslims.”)
On the other hand, Christians were banned from in any way objecting to their relatives converting to Islam.
In classic “Rosa Parks” fashion, Christians even had to “honor the Muslims, show them the way, and rise up from our seats if they wish to sit down.”
A Disarmed Populace
To make sure they never resisted whatever treatment might come their way, Christians also were banned from bearing “any arms whatsoever.”
The Conditions concluded by making clear that if any of its stipulations were violated, all bets were off, and the Muslims were free to punish the culprits. That often took place — and still does — in the context of collective punishment.
Although first formulated in the context of conquered Christians, the Conditions went on to be codified in sharia, forming the basis of Islam’s treatment of those conquered non-Muslims who refused to convert to Islam (“dhimmis”). They remained in force for well over a millennium, until Western colonial powers pressured Muslim rulers to abolish them in the nineteenth century.
The question before us is simple: Do these Conditions, under which millions of non-Muslims have to live, conform to the UN’s definition of genocide: “Deliberately inflicting on the group [non-Muslims] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”?
The fact that we have what is today called the “Islamic world” is an emphatic yes. After all, the heart of the Muslim world (MENA, the Middle East and North Africa) was almost entirely Christian when Islam conquered it in the seventh century. Today MENA is well over 90% Islamic; Christianity has been altogether snuffed out in areas that were once bastions of the faith, such as Algeria (whence Augustine, the father of Western theology, hailed).
A Direct Result
What caused all those Christians, many of whom were described as fiercely attached to their religion, to convert to Islam? The answer is clear as day: Islamic law deliberately inflicted on Christians and Christianity conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.
As yet another example, consider sharia’s position on churches: following the seventh century Muslim conquest of Christian MENA, those nations that resisted had their churches systematically destroyed, while those that capitulated were allowed to retain their preexisting churches—on the condition that they build no more, nor repair the currently existing ones. The Muslim logic was simple: in time, all churches would eventually crumble away.
Incidentally, we haven’t even gotten into Koran 9:29’s demand for jizya — the often exorbitant tax/tribute that all non-Muslims had to pay. Considering that millions of impoverished infidels over the centuries ended up converting to Islam because they couldn’t pay this tax, was jizya not another “condition of life calculated to bring about [the end of Christianity],” as it nearly has in MENA?
After mentioning the “vicious system of bribing the Christians into conversion,” historian Alfred Butler writes in The Arab Conquest of Egypt (1902),
[A]lthough religious freedom was in theory secured for the Copts under the capitulation [to Islam], it soon proved in fact to be shadowy and illusory. For a religious freedom which became identified with social bondage [Conditions of Omar] and with financial bondage [jizya] could have neither substance nor vitality. As Islam spread, the social pressure upon the Copts became enormous, while the financial pressure at least seemed harder to resist, as the number of Christians or Jews who were liable for the poll-tax [jizya] diminished year by year, and their isolation became more conspicuous. … [T]he burdens of the Christians grew heavier in proportion as their numbers lessened. The wonder, therefore, is not that so many Copts yielded to the current which bore them with sweeping force over to Islam, but that so great a multitude of Christians stood firmly against the stream, nor have all the storms of thirteen centuries moved their faith from the rock of its foundation.
Such is the forgotten history of the Copts’ diminution: The fact that 10% of Egypt is still Christian is not a reflection of Muslim tolerance, as many apologists claim, but intolerance. While the lives of many Christians were snuffed out over centuries of violence, the spiritual and cultural identities of exponentially more were wiped out — cleansed through genocide, as defined by the UN — in their gradual conversion to Islam. (Such is the sad and ironic cycle that plagues modern Egypt: those Muslims who persecute Christians are themselves often distant descendants of Copts who first embraced Islam to evade their own persecution.)
Worst of all, this entire matter is not limited to history. Because the Conditions and jizya are doctrinal aspects of Islam, they continue to permeate and influence the Islamic world (as in Saudi Arabia, our “good friend and ally,” where not even a single church can be built for Christian use).
In other words, to this very day throughout the Islamic world, non-Muslims in general and Christians in particular continue to live under “conditions of life calculated to bring about [their demise].” If they are not persecuted outright, they are at least discriminated against; and churches are either outright banned or face numerous, often insurmountable, bureaucratic hurdles to their existence (including in more “moderate” nations, from Egypt to Indonesia).
It’s not for nothing that, according to reliable statistics, approximately 84% of the absolute worst persecution Christians experience around the globe takes place in the name of Islam; or that 37 of the 50 worst nations in which one can be a Christian are Muslim.
In short, yes, Islam is, according to the UN’s own definitions, genocidal. But the fact that the UN would never dream of holding sharia accountable is proof positive that all of its laws, especially those that revolve around so-called “human rights” or which seek to ban “hate speech,” are cudgels used to take advantage of certain peoples — apparently never Muslims.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.