This book goes against a politically correct shibboleth that has only grown stronger and more pervasive since the day that a terrorist attack, deliberately planned by subordinates of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans. Politically correct doctrine since 9/11 has held Muslims to a generous standard of conduct as a non-western and ethnically-linked minority group that is presumed to be culturally oppressed. (1. This seems to be a classic example of the bigotry of low expectations, and 2. it blithely ignores the fact that there is no ethnic restriction on membership in the “ummah” or Muslim community.) More importantly, any misconduct by an individual member of this group must not be tied in any way to Islam or to any sect or group thereof.

We seem to have learned since that day to downplay or even deny any connection between terrorism and Islam, but at least three administrations – before during and since 9/11 – assumed that “Islam is a religion of peace” and that terrorists cannot be “good Muslims” or reflect the true interpretation of Islam. Part of the “logic” (or “wish fulfillment”) of this narrative has to do, at least partly, with a fear that by making war on terrorists who happen to be nominally Muslim, the U.S. might be seen to be at war with all Muslims – all 1.6 billion of them, which would be imprudent and untenable.

As Glenn Beck writes in this book, “According to the Clarion Project, President Bush was due to meet personally with Muslim leaders—many with [Muslim] Brotherhood connections—in 2001. One of the invitees, Abdurahman Alamoudi, had also met with officials in the Clinton administration. Alamoudi would later be sentenced to twenty-three years in prison for plotting with Libyans to assassinate the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. That meeting, which was to happen on September 11, was, of course, canceled.” That cancellation was not due to Alamoudi’s criminality being found out by the administration, but was only because the events of 9/11 effectively cleared the president’s schedule of business as usual.

The Muslim Brotherhood, alluded to in the above quotation, plays a major role in this book. Founded in the early twentieth century to promote a return to Islamic purity and supremacy, the Brotherhood has spawned many spin-offs including al-Qaeda. Subsidiaries of the organization have been cited by U.S. government investigators for raising money for terrorist groups and spreading violent Muslim supremacist propaganda. The Brotherhood also directly backed the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and his replacement with Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi whose subsequent autocratic rule and repressive measures earned him little popular support when a military coup removed Morsi not too long after he became president.

The comedy of errors that has come out of the West’s inability – or unwillingness – to make an effort to distinguish the bad guys from the good guys has resulted in anything but a comedy. Across administrations, nominally Muslim front groups for terrorists have been both indicted and welcomed into the halls of government. They have even had a hand in deleting any references to Islam from government manuals on dealing with terrorism.

When a Muslim member of the U.S. military slaughtered 13 of his fellow soldiers while crying “Allahu Akbar!” (Allah is great!), it was classified as “workplace violence,” even though Major Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator, had been in contact with a radical Muslim cleric and had told colleagues that he believed the U.S. position in the Middle East was wrong and that he sided with the enemy. This sounded dangerous to some of his colleagues, but they dared not report Hasan because, by 2009, it had already become U.S. government policy to treat Muslims with kid gloves even if they preached violence against the United States. Other mass murders that followed had an obvious religious component, too, but were dismissed as “lone wolf” acts – even when connections between these lone wolves and known terrorists were identified, and even when the so-called lone wolves acted jointly with others as in the massacres that took place at the Boston Marathon and in San Bernardino, California. Two or more “lone wolves” acting in concert with each other are rather obviously not alone. (Facilitating the argument against a foreign-inspired operation – even when contacts with foreign operatives via the internet have been established – is the fact that most of the American cases have been amateurishly carried out – for example, San Bernardino; whereas more of the European attacks, such as the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, were perpetrated by well-trained combatants.)

The notion that terrorists cannot represent Islam or reflect its values and aims is not tenable, and not just because it ignores the statistical reality that the majority of terrorists around the world turn out to have Muslim ties. A Pew Poll of Muslims in various countries notes that large numbers – sometimes large minorities and other times actual majorities – are sympathetic to some of the goals of terrorists, including a brutal, literalist interpretation of sharia (Muslim law) and the imposition of sharia on non-Muslim societies, and violence against those who leave or criticize Islam. The trouble is that, despite western attempts not to offend the rank and file Muslim, the terrorists are winning hearts and minds to a worrisome degree.

Much of this book is devoted to a history of Islam, what the Quran – the holy book of Islam – actually says and how Muslims interpret it, as well as their interpretation of other Muslim texts. Are terrorists who say they represent Islam to be taken at their word or should we say that they must not be real or good Muslims? I have looked into this question myself. I happen to have two versions/editions of the translation of the Quran by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1872-1953), who divided his life between his native India and England. I took a passage that has often been cited as proof of Islam’s violent intolerance, and I consulted Ali’s commentary on the passage. Ali’s basic position throughout his commentary is that the language in many Quranic passages should not be taken literally. After all, when it comes to stoning people to death, chopping off body parts, or sanctioning battlefield atrocities, people do not do such things anymore, right? The trouble is that people who call themselves Muslim today are engaging in exactly those kinds of things, and they can justify their behavior by taking the Quran literally. Indeed, it is my impression that the more literally one takes the Quran, the more one must agree that the terrorists’ interpretation is correct. It is not up to non-Muslims to either tell Muslims that they must not make literal interpretations or to pretend that they don’t when a great many of them do.

It is sometimes argued that the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity are just as violent as the verses of the Quran, and, indeed, they are; but most Jews and Christians have long since taken the position with their own scriptures that Ali nearly a century ago took with his: that they are to be taken non-literally and that civilized people no longer stone criminals to death or preach the subjugation and/or extermination of members of other groups. Again, the more literally one takes one’s scriptures, the more intolerance, cruelty and violence seem like holy ideals.*

As to the alliance that has grown up between the political left and the radical Muslim cause, I would feel remiss if I did not mention the utter incongruity of this alliance. Theoretically based on the left’s championing of the underdog and the radical Muslim’s self-identification as just such an underdog, oppressed historically by colonialism and still oppressed by colonialism’s legacy, the alliance has to overlook many glaring contradictions. The left has come to champion open sexuality, rights for homosexuals, gender fluidity for transgender individuals including equal access to public restrooms, equal rights for women and other groups, religious freedom including freedom for secularists and atheists, and political freedom (at least for socialists). Swept under the rug is the fact that many hardcore Islamic radicals would kill LGBTQ persons, oppress and abuse women, and oppress or massacre religious minorities, especially Jews. There seems to be a sell-by date on this alliance. (If you want to see “A Handmaid’s Tale,” you needn’t look for it in some fantasy dystopia; just look at life under the Islamic State.)

As Beck writes:
“Islam is increasingly becoming intolerant, not just of Westerners and others around the world who seek to stand up for basic freedoms and human rights, but of millions of Muslims as well. These voices for moderation, for a classically liberal approach that recognizes faith as something between God and an individual, not to be imposed by governments—are being silenced, and in some instances, targeted and killed.”

It is true that historically speaking, the fact that Jewish and Christian communities in territories held by ISIS are only now being forced to flee, after centuries of living relatively peacefully under majority Muslim rule, tells the tale on the abberative nature of radical Islam. A valid criticism of Beck’s dismal take on Islam’s civilization quotient is that it doesn’t take into consideration Islam’s past ability to tolerate other groups now and then. Beck does not tell and perhaps does not know about the great Muslim king of northern India, Akbar the Great, who was a model of tolerance. The trouble is that his successors decided to embark on warlike jihad and, at first, expanded the kingdom, but then over-extended themselves and had to pull back behind even Akbar’s borders. I wonder whether the current expansion of radical, warlike jihad has already spent itself. (Beck published this book while Obama was still president, and things have changed since then.)

Both George Bush and Barack Obama tried to speak for the “religion of peace” that they could not properly represent. Beck declines to make that mistake. “I believe that only when Muslims themselves decide they need a reformation will there be a real chance at one,” Beck says. “But it isn’t for you or me to say. I’m not a Muslim. I cannot tell a Muslim how he or she needs to resolve the deep—and perhaps irreconcilable—conflicts between their faith and freedom.” Beck, nevertheless, tries to tease apart Muslim terrorists from Islam, notwithstanding the caution he urges in doing this when we are not part of the “ummah.” He takes his cue from those who try to distinguish Islam from “Islamism,” the taking of Islamic traditions and texts so literally that terrorism seemingly must be embraced, but he also concludes that, “Saying that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam is like saying that a particular cut of beef has nothing to do with a cow.”

*I am reminded of John Tuturro’s movie “Fading Gigolo” in which Woody Allen’s character, Murray, is accused by an Orthodox rabbi of being a pimp, and is reminded that, in ancient times, a pimp could have been stoned to death under Jewish law. Murray replies, “Let me tell you how glad I am that you no longer do that.” ( )

Renowned scholar and religious authority Glenn Beck identifies sections in the Koran used by the militant Islamists like Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Zarqawi, Anwar al-Awlaki, the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan, etc., etc., to justify their killings and violent behavior against non-believers. Beck makes no excuse for their actions, and ties it directly to selected passages from the Koran. Beck’s message is not too different from that contained in books such as Geert Wilders "Marked for Death"; Brigitte Gabriel's "They Must be Stopped"; Mark Steyn's "America Alone"; Kenneth Timmerman's "Preachers of Hate"; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Heretic". While Beck may concede that not all Muslims are radicalized, but if there are well over a billion Muslims world-wide, and only one-tenth of one percent believe in, or fail to oppose, the radical jihad message of Al Qaeda and ISIS, that's still one million individuals to be concerned about. Finding the way to discredit the radical interpretations by these groups remains the problem. ( )

A disturbing book, but one that needed to be written as well as read. Glenn Beck exposes the truth about Islam, the faith that author Robert Spencer calls "the world's most intolerant religion"; that is, that Muslims want to destroy everyone and everything that is not Muslim and to take over the world, and to expose the lies made by our media and politicians that Islam is a religion of peace and that we need not fear. Highly recommended. ( )

Don't knock it till you read it. it's easy to dismiss it because of the title, author, or fear of not being politically correct, but I am very impressed with the way it is just laying out information, with pages and pages of references. I've got plenty of friends that think I'm a hater just for reading this book. I think they are ostriches for not. polite way of calling them cowards or intellectually dishonest. only two chapters in, and both greatly dismayed at the information but pleased with the book so far. ( )

Another is a long line of warning books that are, sadly, only put out by political conservatives and only marketed to political conservatives. The information in this book is important to know and important to digest. Namely, that without a sort of Islamic Reformation, Islam is incompatible with the rights, liberties, freedoms of the West and the democratic republican governments of the West. Some of the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood and its various scion societies should elicit trepidation in people. But the fear of being called an Islamophobe, a racist, a Nazi keeps people ignorant and silent. That and the insidious values and morals of leftist thought, the neo-Marxist, critical race theory, colonialist bunkum that pervades our universities (which treats everything Judaeo-Christian and Western as evil and exploitative, and treats everything un-Western as pristine and good) does not allow for most intellectual people to even pick up this book, much less read it and digest it. Islam is incompatible with the Western ideals of freedom (and they admit it if you know where to look). Simple as that. But try telling anyone and not getting called a fear-mongering bigot. ( )