A recent assassination attempt in Turkey offers valuable lessons for the West concerning Islamist hate—and the amount of deceit and betrayal that hate engenders towards non-Muslim “infidels.”
Last January, an assassination plot against a Christian pastor in Turkey was thwarted. Police arrested 14 suspects. Two of them had been part of the pastor’s congregation for more than a year, feigning interest in Christianity. One went so far as to participate in a baptism. Three of the suspects were women. “These people had infiltrated our church and collected information about me, my family and the church and were preparing an attack against us,” said the pastor in question, Emre Karaali, a native Turk: “Two of them attended our church for over a year and they were like family.”
And their subversive tactics worked: “The 14 [suspects] had collected personal information, copies of personal documents, created maps of the church and the pastor’s home, and had photos of those who had come to Izmit [church] to preach.”
Consider the great lengths these Islamic supremacists went to in order to murder this Christian pastor: wholesale deception, attending non-Islamic places of worship and rites to the point that “they were like family” to the Christian they sought to betray and kill. While some may think such acts are indicative of un-Islamic behavior, they are, in fact, doctrinally permissible and historically demonstrative.
Islamic teaching permits deceits, ruses, and dispensations. For an in depth examination, read about the doctrines of taqiyya, tawriya, and taysir. Then there is Islam’s overarching idea of niyya (or “intention”), best captured by the famous Muslim axiom, “necessity makes permissible the prohibited.” According to this teaching, the intentions behind Muslim actions determine whether said actions are permissible or not.
From here one may understand the many incongruities of Islam: lying is forbidden—unless the intention is to empower Islam; killing women and children is forbidden—but permissible during the jihad; suicide is forbidden—unless the intention is to kill infidels, in which case it becomes a “martyrdom operation.”
Thus, feigning interest in Christianity, attending church for over a year, participating in Christian baptisms, and becoming “like family” to an infidel—all things forbidden according to Islamic Sharia—become permissible in the service of the jihad on Christianity.
History offers several examples of Muslims feigning friendship and loyalty to non-Muslims only to break faith at the opportune moment, beginning with Islam’s founder. When a non-Muslim poet, Ka’b ibn Ashraf, offended Muhammad, the prophet exclaimed: “Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his prophet?” A young Muslim named Ibn Maslama volunteered on condition that, to get close enough to Ka’b to assassinate him, he be allowed to deceive the poet. The prophet agreed. Ibn Maslama went to Ka’b feigning friendship; the poet trusted his sincerity and took him into his confidence. Soon thereafter, the Muslim youth returned with a friend and, while the trusting poet’s guard was down, they slaughtered him.
Likewise, Muhammad commanded a convert from an adversarial tribe to conceal his new Muslim identity and go back to his tribe—which he cajoled with a perfidious “You are my stock and my family, the dearest of men to me"—only to betray them to Islam.
Such are the lengths some Muslims—past and present—go to in order to win the trust of those infidels they mean to betray. For example, in October 2012 in Somalia, a nation that has nothing in common with Turkey, neither race, language, nor culture—only Islam—this same story of betrayal recently took place. When a Muslim sheikh became suspicions that a woman in his village had converted to Christianity, he sent his wife to the apostate, instructing her to pretend to be interested in learning about Christianity. The trusting Christian woman was only too happy to share the Gospel with the feigning Muslim woman. After it was verified that the woman was Christian, the sheikh and other Muslims went to her house and shot her dead.
Such betrayals can only be understood in the context of the growing hate felt for infidels, Christians at the top of the list. In Turkey alone—a relatively “moderate” nation in comparison to other Muslim nations like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—recent anecdotes of hate include the slaying of an 85-year-old Christian Armenian woman, who was repeatedly stabbed to death in her apartment. A crucifix was carved onto her naked corpse. This is the fifth attack in the past two months against elderly Christian women (one lost an eye), even though Christians make less than 1% of Turkey’s population.
The Turkish pastor targeted for assassination also explained the great enmity felt for Christians: “There is hate and this hate feeling continues from people here.” Muslim children often curse and throw rocks at his church and its congregation—which consists of only 20 members.
Then of course there was the Malatya massacre. In April 2007, several terrorists attacked a publishing house in Malatya, Turkey, for distributing Bibles. They bound, tortured, and stabbed for several hours three of its Christian employees before slitting their throats. Evidence also later emerged that the massacre was part of a much larger operation, including involvement of elements in Turkey’s military. One unidentified suspect later said: “We didn’t do this for ourselves, but for our religion [Islam]…. Let this be a lesson to enemies of our religion.”
Indeed, the true “lesson” is best captured by the following question: If some Muslims, including women, are willing to go to such lengths to eliminate the already ostracized and downtrodden non-Muslim minorities in their midst—attending churches and becoming like “family members” to those infidels they intend to kill—how much deceit and betrayal must some of the smiling Muslim activists of America, especially those in positions of power and influence, be engaging in to subvert and eliminate the most dangerous of all infidels, the original Great Satan?
And yet, according to the Obama administration, the only Islamic-related threat Americans need to worry about is al-Qaeda—open, bearded terrorists screaming “death to America” while toting their Kalashnikovs—not, of course, that the administration allows that al-Qaeda has anything to do with “radical extremist Islamism,” let alone Islam proper.
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
