The real cause of Islamic terrorism: “We are motivated by our religion, by our Qur’an and Sunnah”
Every time a new jihad attack strikes innocents in the West, media and politicians get busy blaming “bad integration,” “poverty,” “marginalization,” “racism,” etc.
For some reason, it never occurs to them to ask if Islamic terrorism has anything to do with Islam and the increasing number of followers of this particular religion in our countries.
Are they overlooking something? Could there be a connection?
Islam and violence?
Together with a team of fellow researchers, the Danish researcher Tina Magaard meticulously analyzed the texts of the 10 largest religions in the world, searching for possible connections to violence. Magaard’s conclusion is clear:
“Islam’s religious texts call upon its followers to commit violence and to fight to a much higher degree than any other religion. The texts in Islam are clearly distinct from those of other religions’ texts, as they to a much higher degree call for violence and aggression against followers of other faiths. There are also direct incitements to terror. This has long been a taboo within research in Islam, but it is a fact we have to acknowledge,” says Tina Magaard.
During their research, Magaard and her team found hundreds of calls to fight against followers of other faiths in the Quran.
“If it is true that many Muslims view the Quran as God’s own words that can not be rephrased or interpreted in a non-literal manner, we have a problem,” Magaard warns.
Research by the German Social Science Research Center (WZB) confirms Magaard’s worries: 75 percent of Muslims in Europe think that the Quran must be taken literally.
Could the increasing amount of mosques and imams preaching these texts have anything to do with the likewise increase in Islamic terrorism?
Are Muslims really more violent?
So how does reading the Quran and practicing Islam influence people?
An enormous study involving in-depth interviews with 45,000 respondents led by former German minister of Justice, Christian Pfeiffer, casts light on this subject. The many interviews showed that Islam is distinguished by being the only religion that makes people more prone to violence the more religious one becomes.
“Even when other social factors were taken into account, there remained a significant correlation between religiosity and readiness to use violence,” Pfeiffer stated, adding that he felt dismayed by the research results, as they support critics of Muslim immigration such as Thilo Sarrazin and others.
Could the growing number of Islamic schools have anything to do with the fact that Europe’s Muslim youth are being increasingly radicalized?
Maybe: 80 percent of young Turks in Holland see “nothing wrong” in waging Jihad against non-Muslims. 27 percent of all young French and 14 percent of all young British under 25 sympathize with the genocidal terror organisation Islamic State. This includes most probably the vast majority of young Muslims in these two countries.
Instead of undocumented speculation and theoretical discussions about the cause of Islamic terrorism, researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Waterloo decided to talk with surviving terrorists to get firsthand knowledge about what motivates them.
Talking with the terrorists, it became clear that they had not been pushed by socioeconomic factors in society such as low income, lack of education, feelings of marginalization or simple boredom. Instead, they found that the terrorists had been pulled by their religion and what it demands of its followers.
“Not one of the subjects suggested directly or indirectly that being marginalized socially or economically pushed them onto such an extreme path,” says the researchers behind the study, Lorne L. Dawson, Amarnath Amarasingam, and Alexandra Bain.
“Academic studies have put too much weight on those ‘push’ factors — the problems and frustrations in the lives of young men who turn to extremist Islam and, ultimately, terrorist violence. Based on what we are hearing in interviews with foreign fighters — more interviews than anyone has yet reported on — we think more attention and significance should be given to the repeated affirmations of the positive benefits of being a jihadi.”
As one terrorist said during an interview: “The zeal for jihad always struck me when I would sit in my room and read Qur’an with English translation.”
“We are motivated by our religion, by our Qur’an and Sunnah and we are not ashamed of that,”another said.
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