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Yesterday the American Film Renaissance Festival showed the documentary, "Islam: What the West Needs to Know." This remarkable film contains expert testimony from Robert Spencer, former terrorist Walid Shoebat, Serge Trifkovic and Bat Ye-or. These experts quote from the Koran and the Hadiths (the official biography of Mohammad, considered sacred texts in Islam) to show that fundamentalist Islam instructs its followers to make war on non-Muslims until they accept second-class citizenship or convert to Islam, and until Sharia law is installed everywhere on Earth. Today's terrorists are carrying out these instructions word-for-word (as shown in an example cited in this recent post, titled "Zarqawi: Jihad Won't End Until Sharia Law is Imposed Everywhere on Earth." )
Islam is not a religion in the Western sense. As Shoebat points out in the film, Westerners consider religion to be about a person's relationship to himself and to God. Islam is primarily a political and legal structure, and is first and foremost about man's relationship to his fellow man, specifically, the relationship of enforcing Sharia law on all fellow men.
The film contains an astonishing map of the world, showing all the current wars that are taking place. In the vast majority of them, at least one party in the conflict is Muslim. The observation is made in the film that if the conflicts with Muslims were taken away, the world would be a very peaceful place. Islam is not a religion of peace. The word "Islam" does not mean "peace" -- it means "submission" -- submission to Sharia law.
The most dangerous strategy employed by Islamic fundamentalists is to immigrate into a nation, and then, when their numbers are sufficiently high, to move to enforce Sharia law there. We have seen the effectiveness of this strategy in France and England.
The single most chilling thing for me in the film was Shoebat's testimony that when he was working in America for an American company, and the first war in Iraq was taking place, he would watch TV with his fellow employees, and when Americans were killed, he would say with them how sad he was. He would then drive home to his apartment building in America, which housed many other Muslims, and host at his apartment, a viewing party, attended by many other Muslims in his building, at which they would all watch TV and cheer the deaths of Americans.
No other religion on Earth calls for the killing and/or forced conversion of others to that religion. No other religion on Earth calls for a system of laws to be installed everywhere on Earth. As Spencer points out in the film, Sharia law is utterly incompatible with the Western culture of human rights.
It is necessary for us in the West to understand that Islam is not just another kind of "love-thy-neighbor" religion. It is not like our culture at all. It is incompatible with our culture.
Update: Clay Champlin and Andrew Marcus have great video blogging of the festival, including video of audience reaction to this film.
Note: In the original version of this post, paragraph five read "war in Afghanistan" where it now reads "the first war in Iraq."
