HOW KAREN ARMSTRONG TELLS HER LIES ABOUT THE NATURE AND ORIGINS OF ISLAM (MOHAMMEDANISM)

(SPECIAL FEATURE ON JEWISH HISTORY LINKED TO www.wedefendisrael.com)

WE SAY

Not just Jews either, but all workers and youth, must gain a scientific and truthful knowledge of history. From an historical viewpoint, and from the viewpoint of gaining a truthful understanding of history, Karen Armstrong is a liar!

 

On Muhammad’s treatment of Banu Qurayzah, a Jewish tribe Karen Armstrong
This is what Karen Armstrong wrote, can be found on this abnoxious website http://www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/study_res/karen_arm/qurayzah.html :There then ensued desperate days for the ummah. Muhammad had to contend with the hostility of some of the pagans in Medina, who resented the power of the Muslim newcomers and were determined to expel them from the settlement. He also had to deal with Mecca, where Abu Sufyan now directed the campaign against him, and had launched two major offensives against the Muslims in Medina. His object was not simply to defeat the ummah in battle, but to annihilate all the Muslims. (THEN FOLLOWS THE RATIONALIZATION FOR THE MOHAMMEDAN LIES AND BUTCHERY) The harsh ethic of the desert meant that there were no half-measures in warfare: if possible, a victorious chief was expected to exterminate the enemy, so the ummah faced the threat of total extinction. In 625 Mecca inflicted a severe defeat on the ummah at the Battle of Uhud, but two years later the Muslims trounced the Meccans at the Battle of the Trench, so called because Muhammad protected the settlement by digging a ditch around Medina, which threw the Quraysh, who still regarded war rather as a chivalric game and had never heard of such an unsporting trick, into confusion, and rendered their cavalry useless. Muhammad’s second victory over the numerically superior Quraysh (there had been ten thousand Meccans to three thousand Muslims) was a turning point. It convinced the nomadic tribes that Muhammad was the coming man, and made the Quraysh look decidedly passe. The gods in whose name they fought were clearly not working on their behalf. Many of the tribes wanted to become the allies of the ummah, and Muhammad began to build a powerful tribal confederacy, whose members swore not to attack one another and to fight each other’s enemies. Some of the Meccans also began to defect and made the hijrah to Medina; at last, after five years of deadly peril, Muhammad could be confident that the ummah would survive. (As you read this understand that Karen Armstrong is not giving the full story, especially in relation to the dishonesty and cruelty of Mohammed)   In Medina, the chief casualties of this Muslim success were the three Jewish tribes of Qaynuqah, Nadir and Qurayzah, who were determined to destroy Muhammad and who all independently formed alliances with Mecca. They had powerful armies, and obviously posed a threat to the Muslims, since their territory was so situated that they could easily join a besieging Meccan army or attack the ummah from the rear. When the Qaynuqah staged an unsuccessful rebellion against Muhammad in 625, they were expelled from Medina, in accordance with Arab custom.  Muhammad tried to reassure the Nadir, and made a special treaty with them, but when he discovered that they had been plotting to assassinate him they too were sent into exile, where they joined the nearby Jewish settlement of Khaybar, and drummed up support for Abu Sufyan among the northern Arab tribes. The Nadir proved to be even more of a danger outside Medina, so when the Jewish tribe of Qurayzah sided with Mecca during the Battle of the Trench, when for a time it seemed that the Muslims faced certain defeat, Muhammad showed no mercy. The seven hundred men of the Qurayzah were killed, and their women and children sold as slaves.  The massacre of the Qurayzah was a horrible incident, but it would be a mistake to judge it by the standards of our own time. (Pause here and read that again. This is the main method of rationalisation used by Armstrong…Primitive times so deciet etc. was OK) This was a very primitive society: the Muslims themselves had just narrowly escaped extermination, and had Muhammad simply exiled the Qurayzah they would have swelled the Jewish opposition in Khaybar and brought another war upon the ummah. In  seventh-century Arabia an Arab chief was not expected to show mercy to traitors like the Qurayzah. The executions sent a grim message to Khaybar and helped to quell the pagan opposition in Medina, since the pagan leaders had been the allies of the rebellious Jews. This was a fight to the death, and everybody had always known that the stakes were high. The struggle did not indicate any hostility towards Jews in general, but only towards the three rebel tribes. The Quran continued to revere Jewish prophets and to urge Muslims to respect the People of the Book. Smaller Jewish groups continued to live in Medina, and later Jews, like Christians, enjoyed full religious liberty in the Islamic empires. Anti-semitism is a Christian vice. Hatred of the Jews became marked in the Muslim world only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent loss of Arab Palestine. It is significant that Muslims were compelled to import anti-Jewish myths from Europe, and translate into Arabic such virulently anti-semitic texts as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, because they had no such traditions of their own. Because of this new hostility towards the Jewish people, some Muslims now quote the passages in the Quran that refer to Muhammad’s struggle with the three rebellious Jewish tribes to justify their prejudice. By taking these verses out of context, they have distorted both the message of the Quran and the attitude of the Prophet, who himself felt no such hatred of Judaism. (No end to the deceit of Armstrong…Cruelty therefore is excusable, even good) Muhammad’s intransigence towards the Qurayzah had been designed to bring hostilities to an end as soon as possible. The Quran teaches that war is such a catastrophe that Muslims must use every method in their power to restore peace and normality in the shortest possible time.18 Arabia was a chronically violent society, and the ummah had to fight its way to peace. Major social change of the type that Muhammad was attempting in the peninsula is rarely achieved without bloodshed. But after the Battle of the Trench, when Muhammad had humiliated Mecca and quashed the opposition in Medina, he felt that it was time to abandon the jihad and begin a peace offensive. In March 628 he set in train a daring and imaginative initiative that brought the conflict to a close. He announced that he was going to make the hajj. to Mecca, and asked for volunteers to accompany him. Since pilgrims were forbidden to carry arms, the Muslims would be walking directly into the lions’ den and putting themselves at the mercy of the hostile and resentful Quraysh. Nevertheless, about a thousand Muslims agreed to join the Prophet and set out for Mecca, dressed in the traditional white robes of the hajji. If the Quraysh forbade Arabs to approach the Kabah or attacked bona fide pilgrims they would betray their sacred duty as the guardians of the shrine. The Quraysh did, however, dispatch troops to attack the pilgrims before they reached the area outside the city where violence was forbidden, but the Prophet evaded them and, with the help of some of his Bedouin allies, managed to reach the edge of the sanctuary, camped at Hudaybiyyah and awaited developments. Eventually the Quraysh were pressured by this peaceful demonstration to sign a treaty with the ummah. It was an unpopular move on both sides. Many of the Muslims were eager for action, and felt that the treaty was shameful, but Muhammad was determined to achieve victory by peaceful means.   Hudaybiyyah was another turning point. It impressed still more of the Bedouin, and conversion to Islam became even more of an irreversible trend. Eventually in 630, when the Quraysh violated the treaty by attacking one of the Prophet’s tribal allies, Muhammad marched upon Mecca with an army of ten thousand men. Faced with this overwhelming force and, as pragmatists, realizing what it signified, the Quraysh conceded defeat, opened the city gates, and Muhammad took Mecca without shedding a drop of blood. He destroyed the idols around the Kabah, rededicated it to Allah, the one God, and gave the old pagan rites of the hajj, an Islamic significance by linking them to the story of Abraham, Hagar and Ismail. None of the Quraysh was forced to become Muslim, but Muhammad’s victory convinced some of his most principled opponents, such as Abu Sufyan, that the old religion had failed. When Muhammad died in 632, in the arms of his beloved wife Aisha, almost all the tribes of Arabia had joined the ummah as Confederates or as converted Muslims. Since members of the ummah could not, of course, attack one another, the ghastly cycle of tribal warfare, of vendetta and counter-vendetta, had ended. Single-handedly, Muhammad had brought peace to war-torn Arabia. Courtesy: Karen Armstrong, Islam (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), pp. 19-23)
Amazon.com review of Karen’s Armstrong’ Islam (This review equals the deceit of Armstrong) The picture of Islam as a violent, backward, and insular tradition should be laid to rest, says Karen Armstrong, bestselling author of Muhammad and A History of God. Delving deep into Islamic history, Armstrong sketches the arc of a story that begins with the stirring of revelation in an Arab businessman named Muhammad. His concern with the poor who were being left behind in the blush of his society’s new prosperity sets the tone for the tale of a culture that values community as a manifestation of God. Muhammad’s ideas catch fire, quickly blossoming into a political empire. As the empire expands and the once fractured Arabs subdue and overtake the vast Persian domain, the story of a community becomes a panoramic drama. With great dexterity, Armstrong narrates the Sunni-Shi’ite schism, the rise of Persian influence, the clashes with Western crusaders and Mongolian conquerors, and the spiritual explorations that traced the route to God. Armstrong brings us through the debacle of European colonialism right up to the present day, putting Islamic fundamentalism into context as part of a worldwide phenomenon. Islam: A Short History, like Bruce Lawrence’s Shattering the Myth and Mark Huband’s Warriors of the Prophet, introduces us to a faith that beckons like a minaret to those who dare to venture beyond the headlines. –Brian Bruya   We print this not for profit  but only for educational reasons   ALONG WITH ABOVE READ THIS   from http://sheikyermami.com/2007/04/29/karen-armstrong-attacks-robert-spencer/   Islam is the most Warlike Religion A Danish language researcher has spent over three years analyzing the original texts of ten different religions, and concludes that the Islamic texts stand out by encouraging terror and violence to a larger degree than other religions do. Four years after the terror attacks at the World Trade Center, Danish linguist Tina Magaard presents an analysis that questions Islam’s relationship with terror, violence and Holy War. Islamic texts encourage terror and fighting to a far larger degree than the original texts of other religions, concludes Tina Magaard. She has a PhD in Textual Analysis and Intercultural Communication from the Sorbonne in Paris, and has spent three years on a research project comparing the original texts of ten religions. “The texts in Islam distinguish themselves from the texts of other religions by encouraging violence and aggression against people with other religious beliefs to a larger degree. There are also straightforward calls for terror. This has long been a taboo in the research into Islam, but it is a fact that we need to deal with,” says Tina Magaard. Moreover, there are hundreds of calls in the Koran for fighting against people of other faiths. “If it is correct that many Muslims view the Koran as the literal words of God, which cannot be interpreted or rephrased, then we have a problem. It is indisputable that the texts encourage terror and violence. Consequently, it must be reasonable to ask Muslims themselves how they relate to the text, if they read it as it is,” says Tina Magaard.