by Raymond Ibrahim<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n Someone recently sent me an\u00a0Arabic video<\/a>\u00a0that juxtaposes snippets of sermons delivered by Christian and Muslim leaders in the Middle East. [Note: Two days after this article first appeared on\u00a0PJ Media<\/em>, YouTube removed the video.] The Christian preachers offer up universal supplications that include phrases like “O lord, lover of all mankind and savior of all the world”; they quote biblical passages such as “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5: 44); they pray that God may “heal all people around the world of their diseases.”<\/p>\n While such prayers are familiar, taken for granted even, the supplications of the Muslim preachers may surprise some. Popular Egyptian preacher, Sheikh Muhammad al-Zoghbi, was taped invoking his god thusly:<\/p>\n May Allah cut your tongue out! May he freeze the blood in your veins! May he inflict you with cancer and allow you no reprieve\u2026 Allah, strike them with all sorts of disease, afflictions and pain! Allah, strike them with cancer! Allah, let your prophet overpower them! Allah destroy them! Allah destroy them! Allah destroy them! Allah destroy the criminals who challenge the noble prophet! [Then, very serenely addressing his Muslim viewers:] And peace upon you, and Allah’s mercy and blessings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Likewise, Sheikh Abdullah Nihari supplicated Allah with outstretched arms accordingly:<\/p>\n Lord, Lord, we condemn them before you!! Freeze the blood in their veins!! Strike them with evil, or at the very least freeze the blood in their veins \u2014 until they pray for death, but do not receive it!! O lord! O lord! O lord!…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One need not understand Arabic to appreciate the intensity of Nihari’s hate:watch<\/a>\u00a0the 45 seconds starting at minute 2:15, and see the gesticulating cleric issue his curse \u2014 while striking the floor with a stick, hurling a picture, and pounding on the wall.<\/p>\n Also shown was a snippet of formal prayers at Mecca, Islam’s holiest city. As Muslims circumambulated around the Ka’ba, the following supplications were blasted on a megaphone, chanted to by Islam’s devotees:<\/p>\n O Allah vanquish the unjust Christians and the criminal Jews, the unjust traitors; strike them with your wrath; make their lives hostage to misery; drape them with endless despair, unrelenting pain and unremitting ailment; fill their lives with sorrow and pain and end their lives in humiliation and oppression; inflict your tortures and punishments upon the unjust Christians and criminal Jews. This is our supplication, Allah; grant us our request!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What to make of this immense contrast between Christian and Muslim prayers to the deity? Of course, in former times, these contradicting approaches would simply have been interpreted as natural reflections of the divine and the diabolical.<\/p>\n Today, however, when moral relativism portrays all religions equally \u2014 that is, all are equally meaningless with no tangible impact on their devotees’ lives \u2014 many may conclude that the Christian prayers, calm and grateful, evince Christian contentment under Islam, whereas the Muslim prayers, irate if not insane, evince sincere grievance.<\/p>\n Nothing could be further from the truth. If prayers and supplications were mere reflections of one’s level of contentment or discontentment with this world, then surely the Christians of the Muslim world \u2014 where churches and Bibles are burned, Christian girls are abducted and forced to convert, blasphemy and apostasy laws kill, and even the\u00a0state massacres Christians<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 would be praying for fire and pestilence to descend upon their persecutors.<\/p>\n Conversely, Muslim leaders are quick to point to anything to rationalize their prayers of hate. Thus when Professor\u00a0Abd al-Latif<\/a>\u00a0was asked if Sharia law permits Muslims to pray for the “annihilation” of Jews and Christians, he said yes, since Jews are unjust to Palestinians and Christians are responsible for Abu Ghraib, adding that “the prophet himself used to invoke curses.”<\/p>\n Indeed, Muhammad \u2014 who counseled cursing Islam’s enemies by, among other things, telling them to\u00a0bite their father’s penis<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 condemned and called violence against Christians and Jews, beginning in his Quran’s opening prayer, the\u00a0Fatiha<\/em><\/a>, which Muhammad uttered some thirteen centuries before the creation of the modern state of Israel and the events of Abu Ghraib \u2014 that is, before any “grievances.”<\/p>\n The lesson? Prayers do not reflect one’s contentment with the world; they reflect the teachings of one’s faith.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Raymond Ibrahim<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Raymond Ibrahim PJ Media Someone recently sent me an\u00a0Arabic video\u00a0that juxtaposes snippets of sermons delivered by Christian and Muslim leaders in the Middle East.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[29,225,227],"tags":[192,1035,1017,431,30,1016],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-qs","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1064,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/christmas-under-islam-hardly-a-season-to-be-jolly\/","url_meta":{"origin":1640,"position":0},"title":"Christmas Under Islam: Hardly a Season to be Jolly","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 21, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim PJ Media Earlier I\u00a0discussed\u00a0how mosques, some of which\u00a0breed radicalization\u00a0and serve as\u00a0terrorist bases, flourish in America, while churches are increasingly targeted and destroyed in the Muslim world, especially the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity. This pattern \u2014 religious appeasement of Muslim minorities in the West, religious hostility\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7216,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-are-slaughtering-us-like-chickens-muslim-persecution-of-christians-december-2013\/","url_meta":{"origin":1640,"position":1},"title":"The Are Slaughtering Us Like Chickens’: Muslim Persecution of Christians, December 2013","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 15, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/\u00a0Gatestone Insitute As happens at Christmas every year throughout the Muslim world, Christians and their churches were especially targeted\u2014from jihadi terror strikes killing worshippers, to measures by Muslim authorities restricting Christmas celebrations.\u00a0 Some incidents follow:","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6773,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/muslim-blood-superior-to-infidel-blood\/","url_meta":{"origin":1640,"position":2},"title":"Muslim Blood Superior to Infidel Blood","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/\u00a0RaymondIbrahim.com\u00a0 Arguing that Muslim blood is more precious than infidel blood, Muslim clerics in and out of Sudan are outraged because a Sudanese court has condemned a Muslim man to death\u2014simply because he murdered a non-Muslim, the American diplomat John Granville on January 1, 2008. A 2009\u00a0report\u00a0offers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3441,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/mosques-flourish-while-churches-perish\/","url_meta":{"origin":1640,"position":3},"title":"Mosques Flourish While Churches Perish","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 9, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Western tolerance had no mirror in the Islamic world. by Raymond Ibrahim PJ Media As Muslims prepare to erect a mega-mosque near the site of the 9\/11 atrocities, it is well to reflect that the sort of tolerance, or indifference, that allows them to do so, is far from reciprocated\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Religion"","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/religion\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1476,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/liberalism-and-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":1640,"position":4},"title":"Liberalism and Islam?","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 31, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Top Muslim cleric Qaradawi urges western Muslims to 'liberalize' outwardly, anyway. by Raymond Ibrahim PJ Media A\u00a0recent episode\u00a0of the popular Arabic show\u00a0al-Sharia wa al-Haya\u00a0(Law and Life), which airs weekly on Al Jazeera and features renowned Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, addressed the important yet little known Muslim concept of\u00a0taysir\u00a0(pronounced \"tey-seer\").\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Raymond Ibrahim"","block_context":{"text":"Raymond Ibrahim","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/raymond-ibrahim\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2395,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/reading-between-the-lines\/","url_meta":{"origin":1640,"position":5},"title":"Reading Between the Lines","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 2, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Jihad Watch When reading Western reports dealing with Islam, one must learn to read between the lines. Many of these reports do state the actual facts; but without providing proper context, Western readers are often left to interpret the information according to their own understandings. One example:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1640"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1642,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions\/1642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}