By Patrick Dele-Cole

I have read the Quran over seven times, page by page.   As I have been at pains  to point out education is universal and every culture, religion, group contributes to its gigantic trough.  Islam, the Arabs,  shintos,  Confucius  have done their bit  by contributing their  wisdom  into  this pot.   I do not claim to be an Islamic scholar and my piece was not about the doctrines of Islam.

It was about world politics which I know many Islamists  are unable to differentiate from Islamic ideology.   This is not about a doctrinaire commitment to one religion or the other or to the West as I have been condemned to be.   The Pope has his problems and good luck to him.

There are 28 wars in the world today.   26 are or concern Islam, or  Islamists – either the Islamists are persecuted or there must be another explanation  for there to be so many wars in Islamic areas.   In any case the question of persecution cannot arise as most of these wars are in Islamic countries where one group of Moslems  are  trying to  wipe out  another group.

Some accuse me of not understanding Islam, having a little knowledge of the religion, of not reading the commentaries as well as the doctrines as contained in the Koran.   I am the first to accept that I learn every day even from the misguided personal attacks or  apologists for a failure of an otherwise powerful tonic of  human  and heavenly  endeaveour  – Islam.

I have never praised the West or Christianity.   The failure of Christianity and the West in several  theatres of human endeavour  is self evident.  If the conquistadors were blood thirsty and bestial, that is not an attribute of Christianity, it  was a human failure and tragedy, and strongly condemnable.

If a group of hoodlums, without any human conscience, could seize  276  girls at a school in Chibok  in the name of Islam, all those who profess that religion have one of two options – dissociate Islam from that action or, by their silence, acquiesce that the religion actually supports violence against  such soft  targets.   It is the silence of a majority of Moslems that leads to the conclusion  or to the suspicion  that they deep down believe these  unwarranted  bestial attacks of innocents  are  justifiable.

The commandment of  God, Allah,  is  “thou shall not kill”.   In his commandment, there are no if or buts.  If a Moslem in the name of the religion beheads Sergeant Rigby,  even if obviously both perverts  are descended from Nigerian parentage, there is nothing but condemnation for their act.

The reality of what faces us is clear- the majority of those killed by Moslems are their fellow Moslems in Syria, in Iraq, in Pakistan.   If the Taliban in the name of some perversion of Islam, can go to a school and kill 145 Moslem Pakistani school children, the answer to their evil is an earth shattering: “No, you are evil”.

If one Moslem, in the name of this same perversion of Islam, can in Sydney, Australia,  hold 17 people hostage and display a sign of Islam in his demented action, I do not need my good Islamic friends consent to point out unadulterated evil where it is so glaring. If Hitler killed six million Jews in an attempt to wipe out the Jewish race, he committed genocide and war crimes.   No  none  would call what he did  Christian:   he may have been a Catholic but his religion did not encourage his atrocity.   The allies who fought Hitler were also Christians but they did not go to war in the name of Christianity.   It seems incredibly puerile to even discuss Hitler’s  evil in the name of any religion. So the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were Christian bombs!!   Incredible!!!

The holy book of Quran has plenty to attract people of all faiths.   What has gone wrong is that people, radicalized, by commentaries on the Quran, in the name of Islam,  are killing themselves and children. Islamic states are refusing to allow Moslem women marry non-Muslims; sometimes the parents of such women have killed the women rather than allow such marriage.   If my  detractors argument is that you cannot judge Islam by the action of the “extremists”, I have no argument against that.   But  when extremists are allowed to rule whole countries, imposing inhuman treatment on all dissenters, then  true Moslems must not only condemn such actions, they themselves must take action against their own extremists.

There have been many killings in the U.S. by obviously mad people in schools, in cinemas, etc.   No one of good conscience has  ever had anything to say but to  condemn  the actions of these mad men.   If those who killed Sergeant Rigby  by butchering him to death in the streets of London  are condemned as despicable unhinged Moslems, I have no problem with that.   But to accuse me of lack of sympathy or understanding of Islam because I bemoan actions  perperpetrated  in the name of Islam by radicalized Islamists is to be  blinded by the proverbial beam  in one’s eyes.    (Remove the beam from your eyes before you can see clearly to remove the mucus in your  neighbour’s eye).

Human cruelty

Radical Islamists, in their misguided mission, seized seven planes;  deliberately crashed them in the Pentagon, World Trade Centre, etc.  The  killing  of  thousands of people remain  an act of unmatched human cruelty exceeded only by Hitler and Rwandan genocide.   In Iraq, the ISIS was asking people to quote verses in the Quran and failure to do so meant death.

Someone has whispered to me that the bombings in the US and in Europe –rail stations, underground transports –  were strategic or tactical  manoeuvres  – in a war not dissimilar to the ones used against the British by the IRA  (the Irish Republican Army)  in its war of independence, or indeed  by sympathizers of  the  allies in the underground movements  attempting  to tumble  the German forces in France and elsewhere during the  Second World War.   But what  demented radicalized Moslems have done far outstrips consideration of strategy or tactics.   What strategy do you  have to kill children and women?   Is it  to strengthen the resolve of the rest of Islam?   The children in Pakistan were killed by seven suicide bombers who went into the school to unleash mayhem.

When people talk about tactics and strategy – they in fact mean that whatever they have  done could be justified by claiming that they engage the attention of the enemy.   Islam now fully has the attention of the world.   What does Islam want???

Nigerian Boko Haram state

In the context of Nigeria the  Boko  Haram  has declared its objectives to be nothing less than the annihilation of the nation,  Nigeria,  to be replaced by an Islamic caliphate state.   It is still hazy about what it means as a state because we have many Islamic states in the world  – Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc.   What  will happen to non-Moslems in such a  Nigerian  Boko Haram  state?   Will they follow the  Chibok  experience – convert our women and marry them to Moslems? It was religion that divided India and Pakistan – where we had the unworkable agreement of East Pakistan and West Pakistan – leading to the eventual creation of Bangladesh.

In an Islamic Nigerian nation under  Boko  Haram, what would happen to large chuncks of the Middle Belt, and most of the South?   Is the recipe of  Boko  Haram  the creation  of parts of the North into an Islamic state?   Would they yield in negotiations to breaking up Nigeria or do they still need the  oil of the Niger Delta?   If the  proposition is a northern Islamic State, there maybe several takers, although I will oppose it.   It is like a child who sees chocolate  and gauges  itself on it until  it  is sick.   The South needs the North as much as the North needs the South.   But as at today, Mr.    President’s  writ does not run in 33% of Nigeria.   That is a serious problem which the elections  will not solve.   But rather exacerbate.

But Moslems must seriously ask themselves what they want?   There is, whether they like it or not, a world order, to which nations  fit.  That order cannot allow the discriminate killing of people who happen not to agree with your way of thinking. I am told that the critics who have inundated the press on my views are doctrinaire and therefore illogical, beyond reasoning.    I have no intention to call anybody names.   We started from the simple premise of looking at realities.   There are wars all over the  world;  nearly all of them are Islamic.

If the boundaries put in place by Europeans in 1919 are the problems, then we are dealing with nationalistic issues.   If that is the case, how many nations, given the ethnic diversity of Iraq, Syria, Iran,  and Libya, are you going to create?   They may all be Moslems but their record in killing one another does not show brotherly goodwill.   So are we dealing with the  problem of ethnic diversity masquerading as religion?

Libya has  been  broken up to ethnic warlords, an outcome the Western  world has been well advised to leave alone in its stupidity in attacking and killing  Ghadaffi.   Iraq had both ethnic and religions divisions which the wars have made more truculent.   Saudi Arabia, Syria  etc,is a polyglot of ethnic diversity; so is Pakistan.   Indeed the only glue keeping these countries together was Islam but even that has come  unstock  because of the Sunni/Shia dissent.

What kind of Islamic state would be established in Syria, Iraq, and Nigeria – if we take the pretension of the radicalized Islamists seriously?

Moslems go about announcing that their states are Islamic.   No other  nation declares itself Christian or indeed described them as a Christian state with the exception of the Papacy.   (Israel declares itself a Jewish State which  maybe one of the reasons  peace  is elusive).   Other nations – Brazil, Chile, the US, Canada, Australia, etc-have never described their countries as Christian states.

They are fundamentally secular states, as we declared in our own Constitution.   The oath the President and the Governors swear to is a secular state.   When Presidents and Governors swear to a secular state any deviation from this ought to be an impeachable offence.   The government must withdraw from state  sponsored religions as the unwise support of supporting pilgrimages to Rome, Lourdes, Mecca and Jerusalem.   Performing pilgrimages is a personal effort to worship God or Allah as one  wishes.

The  Ijaw worship  Akaso, a woman, a  godess.   I think it would be ridiculous to ask for government support to worship  Akaso  or  Ikenga, or  Shango  or  Ogun  or Orunmila.   Moslems must themselves lead the fight against extremism.   No one else can.   That extremism and fanaticism give them a bad name; not Mr. Cole’s inability to understand the fundamentals of Islamic doctrine.

Bad name

Some Moslems claiming a long term view and strategy – the growing number of Moslems in the World – have led to the belief that Islam is destined  eventually  to rule the world.   There are extant maps of the future of the world and Islam showing Islam being practised in every country north of the equator in Africa, Islam is supposed to conquer the  rest  of the Middle East, including India, Philippines, the Koreas, large chunks of China and through out Polynesia,ofcourse  Indonesia, Fiji.

These Islamic visionaries see an end of India and even China; the new world Islamic map includes all of the  Slavic  countries – Serbia, Slovakia, Bosnia, nearly all of Russia with the exception of Moscow and Leningrad.   These maps are supported by suspect statistics of the growth of Islam  based on birthrates, wealth etc;  and its eventual world conquest.   I think it is superfluous even to comment on such lunacy and idiocy.

ISIS the other day killed 125 women who said they would not  marry  radicalized Islamists.   The list goes on one atrocity piled on another by Moslems, in the name of Islam, against other peopleindiscrimately.   I would expect all decent people to condemn unreservedly these atrocities.   It has nothing to do with what I understand of Islam.   It has  everything  to do with denying common humanity and human rights.   Wherever these are trammeled,  everyone should be outraged.   Islam or Christianity can never provide a cover for such bestiality.

For the record, let me repeat my view that Tony Blair and George Bush,  Obama, Cameron  and Holland  should be brought before the  World  Court for war crimes against Iraq and  Afghanistan and against Libya.   I have  also suggested that such a court should be able to impose punitive damages against aggressor nations  who go to war merely because they have the capabilities.

The war against Iraq was presumably because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.   It had none.Hans  Blitz,  the UN envoy,  sent to check this could find none.   The war against Libya was unjustified by any measure of international law – the consequences were foreseeable.   Obama, Cameron, Holland bear a heavy responsibility in removing  Ghaddafi admittedly by a dictator. But to do so on the flimsy grounds pronounced – a war of liberation and democracy by Eastern Libyan forces – were bunkum. The place had been left to ruin by the West and they bear a responsibility for it.

What ISIS is now  doing is compounding an already complicated situation bringing in the toxic concoction of radical Islamism to an issue dying and ripe for political solution.   The proponents of Islam have a fundamental problem of rethinking a credible and lasting solution.

The  Amercians  will  leave, so  will  the rest of the West.   What is the political solution?   What will Moslems do?   The evidence is pessimistic.