Defend Israel and Civilization or Keep the Faith—You Can’t Do Both

The October 7 jihad against Israel woke the West from its evasive slumber.

Or did it?

On that day, Hamas (aka Islamic Resistance Movement) massacred more than twelve hundred Israelis—raping women and girls; burning babies, children, and families alive; beheading and mutilating people; taking more than two hundred hostages; and gleefully sharing videos of the atrocities on social media for the world to see.

The questions I want to address are: (1) Why did Hamas do this—what is its motive? (2) What, most fundamentally, underlies and gives rise to this motive? (3) Who is willing to fight Hamas and its supporters at the most fundamental level and who is not?

What Motivates Hamas to Wage Jihad against Israel?

The answer to this question is relatively straightforward, as Hamas explicitly and repeatedly has explained why it exists and wages jihad (holy war). Hamas’s founding covenant is as clear as day: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” Jihad is necessary because “peaceful solutions” to Israel’s existence “are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement”:

[Hamas] aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”¹

Hamas’s goal and reason for being is to kill Jews and destroy Israel. As a cleric on Hamas TV in Gaza explains, “Our doctrine in fighting you [Jews] is that we will totally exterminate you. We will not leave a single one of you alive.”²

Importantly, however, the jihad is not only against Israel and Jews; it is against the non-Muslim world as such. “We are not talking about liberating our land alone,” explains Hamas cofounder and senior official Mahmoud Al-Zahar. “The entire 510 million square kilometers of Planet Earth will come under [Islamic law].”³

The goal of universal submission to Allah comes directly from the Koran, which commands Muslims to engage in jihad, like it or not. “Jihad (holy fighting in Allah’s Cause) is ordained for you (Muslims) though you dislike it, and it may be that you dislike a thing which is good for you and that you like a thing which is bad for you. Allah knows but you do not know” (e.g., 2:216, 9:38). The Koran explicitly and repeatedly commands Muslims not only to kill Jews, but, more broadly, to “kill the unbelievers wherever you find them” (e.g., 2:191, 9:5), “strike off their heads” (e.g., 8:12, 47:4), make sex slaves of their wives and daughters (e.g., 4:24, 33:50)—and continue this jihad “until all opposition ends and all submit to ‘Allah’” (e.g., 8:39, 9:29).

As incentive for Muslims to wage this worldwide holy war for Allah, the Koran tells them that they will win regardless of whether they survive or die: “To him who fighteth in the cause of Allah—whether he is slain or gets victory—soon shall We give him a reward of great value” (4:74). This inducement is central to Hamas’s charter, which states, “The Slogan of the Islamic Resistance Movement” is “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” The promise of reward in an alleged afterlife is why not only Hamas jihadists but also many Palestinian civilians are eager to serve as human shields and die fighting for Allah. Hamas leader Fathi Hammad explains:

For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen [i.e., jihadists] and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen. . . . It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: “We desire death like you desire life.”⁴

Islam is a death cult.

Hamas jihadists, Palestinian Muslims—and all Muslims who truly embrace Islam and take its tenets seriously—seek to die while killing Jews and other non-Muslims in the fight for universal submission to Allah. If and when these death worshippers obliterate Israel and kill all the Jews, their next target will be you and me, our families and loved ones, and the entire civilized world. The Koran commands it. Muslims have told us they will do it. And they have demonstrated that they mean it.

The foregoing shows, in terms of Islamic content, why Muslims engage in jihad against Jews and other non-Muslims. But why do Muslims believe Allah exists in the first place? Why do they accept the content of the Koran as true? What is their method or means of believing such things?

The answer to this question will bring us to a deeper and vital understanding.

Why Do Muslims Believe in Allah and Accept the Koran as True?

Allah is alleged to be an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good being—the creator of the universe, the source of all truth, and the maker of moral law. But this raises a pressing question: Is there evidence for such a being? There is not—which is why no one ever has presented such evidence. On what basis, then, do Muslims accept Allah’s existence? They accept it on faith—faith being acceptance of ideas without evidence. Likewise, the Koran is said to be the word and will of Allah, thus the moral law and the instruction manual for morally correct action. Is there evidence to support this claim? Again, no. Muslims accept it on faith.

When we accept an idea based on evidence, we accept it by means of reason, not faith. The reason we have and need the concept of “faith” is that some people sometimes accept ideas in the absence of or in defiance of evidence, and we need to differentiate such instances from those in which people accept ideas on the basis of evidence. This conceptual need is what gives rise to the concept of “faith.” If we didn’t need to make this distinction, we wouldn’t need the concept.⁵

Now observe that if faith is a means of knowledge—if people can know what is true by means of faith—then they can “know” literally anything to be true. A woman turned into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:26)—check. You should love your neighbors (Leviticus 19:18)—check. You should love your enemies (Matthew 5:44)—check. You should kill homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13)—check. Muslims must kill Jews and unbelievers (see above)—check.

Either faith is a means of knowledge or it is not. If it is a means of knowledge, then whatever anyone accepts by means of faith is by that fact knowledge—that is, true. If so, then the tenets of Islam—which Muslims accept by means of faith—are true.

Of course, faith is not a means of knowledge, and every thinking adult knows this. The problem is that many pretend not to know it. Many go along with the pretense that faith is a means of knowledge to get along with family and friends who pretend that it is a means of knowledge. This is cowardly and immoral in the extreme.

To pretend that faith is a means of knowledge is to support and encourage jihadists—and the Islamic regimes that sponsor them—at the most fundamental level: the epistemological level. It is to say to them, in effect, “Whatever our disagreements, your method of arriving at truth and knowledge is correct.” Well, if their “method” is correct, how can the content they “know” by means of it be incorrect? It can’t be.

This pretense must stop.

It is time for all civilized people to state clearly and openly that faith is not a means of knowledge, that reason is our only means of knowledge, and that all claims to the contrary are dishonest and nonsensical.

Of course, not everyone will do this. But we don’t need everyone to do it. If a courageous and vocal few take the lead, many others will follow, and the ranks of the rational will expand over time. The consequent barrage of truth bombs will strike relentlessly and increasingly at the very root of Islam (faith), undercutting the ersatz confidence that Muslims have in their savage, murderous creed—a parasitic confidence they have only because (a) many Westerners pretend with them that faith is a means of knowledge, and (b) almost no one calls the pretense what it is.

Be one of the vocal few who take the lead. Call faith what it is: a dishonest claim to a pretend means of knowledge.

Who Stands Fundamentally for Civilization and Who Does Not?

Everyone in the civilized world has a choice in this matter: Either acknowledge and give voice to the fact that reason is our only means of knowledge—a principle that, on some level, everyone knows to be true—or remain silent about the pretense that faith is a means of knowledge and thereby spiritually support the jihadists and Islamic regimes that are dedicated to killing Jews and other non-Muslims until everyone on the planet submits to Allah.

This is not a difficult choice. And those who pretend that it is difficult thereby confess to caring more about what irrational people think of them than they do about truth, honesty, and the requirements of human life on Earth.

Make your choice known. And encourage others to do so, too. This will unify people of reason, discredit the foundation of Islam, and make clear who stands fundamentally for civilization and who does not.

About Craig Biddle

Craig is editor in chief of The Objective Standard, director of education at Objective Standard Institute, and executive director of Prometheus Foundation. His books include Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It and Rational Egoism: The Morality for Human Flourishing. Visit his website at CraigBiddle.com.

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