Ahmadi Muslim Spokesman: Muhammad Would Have Hated ISIS’s Persecution of Christians

Last May, I wrote in Breitbart that “Ahmadi Muslim spokesman Qasim Rashid is a one-man cottage industry of deception and hypocrisy, churning out article after article purporting to prove that the Muslims who are killing, enslaving, and terrorizing people all over the world in the name of Islam are really misinterpreting their faith.” And now he is at it again, with a cynically deceptive article in the Huffington Post titled “ISIS Violates The Consensus Of Mainstream Islam By Persecuting Christians.”

It exemplifies the disinformation campaign that the media continues to wage against the truth about Islam that the go-to Islamic expert consulted not just by the Huffington Post, but by so much of the mainstream media, is by all accounts not considered a Muslim in the majority of the Muslim world.

In fact, Qasim Rashid’s tiny sect, the Ahamdi community, is considered heretical and blasphemous by both Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. Most devout Muslims have denounced Ahmadis as kaffirs or heretics, and mainstream Islam generally considers them to be non-Muslims. This is because the Ahmadiyya Community believes that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is the Promised Messiah and that Muhammad was not the final prophet. Heresy! Ahmadis are persecuted, oppressed — even slaughtered.

All that makes Qasim Rashid a despicable shill. He attacks those of us who oppose jihad terror while providing cover for the most brutal and extreme ideology on the face of the earth. Qasim Rashid is to Islam what the kapos were to the Nazis. But the kapos had a gun to their heads; Rashid, on the other hand, sells his people out for the acceptance of a corrupt and complicit media.

In his piece, Rashid claims that despite the wholesale destruction of churches by Islamic groups today, Islam is peaceful because… those churches were still standing before the Islamic State and other jihad armies destroyed them. And he claims that they weren’t destroyed before because of a letter Muhammad supposedly wrote to St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt.

“While Daesh attacks Christians under the guise of religious authority,” Rashid claims, “Muhammad’s letter guaranteed Christians protection from all attacks.” Rashid conveniently ignores the price of such “protection”: the jiyza, an exorbitant poll tax exacted from Christians and Jews. Protection money. The season of the jizya was brutal. Non-Muslim dhimmis were terrorized in the most savage and humiliating ways. The dhimmis were denied basic human rights and were treated as sub-human – but as long as they knew their place and bowed and scraped to their Muslim masters, yes, their churches were not destroyed.

Rashid’s piece is established as even more deceptive by Islamic scholar Robert Spencer, who points out that the tolerant document that Muhammad supposedly wrote is a forgery:

This ancient document, known as the Achtiname, is indeed supposed to have been written by Muhammad around 628 to the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. Unfortunately, it is of even more doubtful authenticity than everything else about Muhammad’s life. Muhammad is supposed to have died in 632; the Muslims conquered Egypt between 639 and 641. The document says of the Christians, “No one shall bear arms against them.” So were the conquerors transgressing against Muhammad’s command issued just over a decade before their invasion of Egypt?

There is no mention of this document in any remotely contemporary Islamic sources. Among other anomalies, it bears a drawing of a mosque with a minaret, although minarets weren’t put on mosques until long after the time Muhammad is supposed to have lived, which is why Muslim hardliners consider them unacceptable innovation (bid’a).

Rashid lies throughout his piece, and Spencer exposes each lie. Rashid quotes a Qur’an passage saying that Christians will go to Paradise (2:63; in many editions, 2:62). But Spencer points out that Rashid isn’t telling the whole story:

Here’s another Qur’an verse that Rashid doesn’t quote: “And whoever desires other than Islam as religion – never will it be accepted from him, and he, in the Hereafter, will be among the losers.” (Qur’an 3:85) How, then, to explain that Qur’an 2:63 seems to say that Christians will enter Paradise, if only those who profess Islam will avoid being “losers” in the “Hereafter”? The Qur’an also says this about those “respected” People of the Book: “Indeed, the disbelievers among the People of the Book and the polytheists will be in the fire of Hell, abiding eternally therein. Those are the most vile of creatures.” (Qur’an 98:6) The “disbelievers among the People of the Book” are the Jews and Christians who don’t become Muslims; 2:63’s promise of Paradise to the Christians only refers to those Christians who accept Islam.

Rashid quotes another Qur’an passage to claim that true Muslims wouldn’t destroy churches: “For, if Allah had not enabled people to defend themselves against one another, monasteries and churches and synagogues and mosques — in which Allah’s name is abundantly extolled would surely have been destroyed” (22:39–22:40). But as Spencer explains, the key phrase in that passage is “in which Allah’s is abundantly extolled”: “While Allah’s name may indeed be abundantly extolled in the churches and synagogues of those who acknowledge Muhammad and the Quran, the same cannot be said of the churches and synagogues of ‘they who disbelieved among the People of the Book.’ This is how the Islamic State, in destroying churches and other houses of worship in Iraq and Syria, can justify its actions on solid Islamic grounds.”

If you want to know the truth about the why ISIS persecutes Christians and others, it’s all in Spencer’s new book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS. You certainly won’t find it out from a deceiver like Qasim Rashid. He’s part of the problem, not the solution. Shame on the Huffington Post for repeatedly giving this jihad apologist a platform – a platform they would never, ever give to truth-tellers and lovers of freedom.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.