39 Quotes About Islamism

No idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity.

The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important.

Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry.

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are.

Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.

The United States finds itself with forces of reaction. Do I have to demonstrate this? The Taliban's annihilation of music and culture? The enslavement of women?

A true martyr is not an opportunist who dies to get a reward of eternal life. A true martyr is a humanist who dies to save a life.

Nothing—not even the US Army—more threatens the future of a democratic, pluralistic and (dare we wish, secular) Iraq than the political ascendancy of Islamic fascists like Al Sadr.