Hezbollah has 100,000 missiles prepared to attack Israel, said General Hossein Salami, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, on Friday.
During a day of violent anti-Israel sentiment and demonstrations in Iran, Salami claimed, “Hezbollahhas 100,000 missiles that are ready to hit Israel to liberate the occupied Palestinian territories if the Zionist regime repeats its past mistakes,” reported Iran’s Tasnim News Agency.
Hezbollah, a recognized terror group, operates in Lebanon, north of Israel.
Speaking in honor of “al Quds Day”, Iran’s annual “holiday” marking solidarity with the Palestinians, Salami continued, “Today, the grounds for the annihilation and collapse of the Zionist regime are [present] more than ever.”
Salami boasted that “tens of thousands of destructive long-range missiles” are aimed at Israel from Islamic territories, said the Jerusalem Post.
Iran itself has stockpiled thousands of missiles in defiance of international strictures, some of which it claims can reach Israel.
Salami warned, “If the Zionists make a wrong move, all the occupied territories will come under attack from dedicated fighters and, God willing, the territories will be liberated.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani also spoke at an al Quds event, accusing the West of “creating discord among Muslims” by exploiting religious differences between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in the Middle East in order to distract attention from the “dispossessed Palestinian nation”.
The Ayatollah Khameni weighed in on Twitter.
With Divine Grace, on Fri., #QudsDay, once again united cries defending oppressed people of #Palestine will rise across Iran & Muslim world.
Anti-Israel riots took place throughout Iran on al Quds Day – the name represents the Arabic moniker for Jerusalem – with both Israeli and American flags being trampled and set alight in the streets. Crowds chanted “Death to Israel” as they burned effigies painted with the Star of David.
Last Friday’s jihadist assault on a Bangladeshi bakery resulting in the brutal deaths of at least 20 hostages and two police officers is the latest in a spate of lethal attacks commemorating the month-long Islamic holy season of Ramadan.
In their faith-based attack, the Islamist terrorists freed all the people who identified as Muslim and could prove it by reciting the Qur’an, while hacking to death the infidels present with machetes. Among the dead from Friday’s attack were nine Italians, seven Japanese, two Bangladeshis, one American and one Indian.
Just before Ramadan began, the Islamic State summoned Muslims to carry out terror attacks during what a group spokesman vowed would be “the month of conquest and jihad.”
A report issued by the U.S.-led Overseas Security Advisory Council warned that the ISIS threat could be credible because of the religious motivation to sacrifice oneself during this sacred time.
“According to Islamic practice, sacrifice during Ramadan can be considered more valuable than that made at other times, so a call to martyrdom during the month may hold a special allure to some,” the report stated.
Since Ramadan began, jihadists have carried out targeted deadly attacks in Orlando, Afghanistan, Kenya, Lebanon, Istanbul, and now Bangladesh.
In the ISIS video calling for such attacks, spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani urged Muslims to “get prepared, be ready … to make it a month of calamity everywhere for nonbelievers… especially for the fighters and supporters of the caliphate in Europe and America.”
Jihadist attacks during Ramadan are nothing new, and underscore the religious motivation for the carnage. During Ramadan 2015, for instance, Islamic jihadists carried out attacks in France, Syria, Kuwait, Syria, Somalia, and Tunisia.
Westerners are holding their collective breath as Muslims gear up for the final 24 hours of Ramadan 2016. A U.S. security expert is urging Americans to maintain vigilance during Monday’s Fourth of July celebrations.
One of the greatest problems with the much cherished “moderate/radical” Muslim dichotomy is that it’s entirely based on Western assumptions that have nothing to do with the realities of Islam.
This came out in a study published in Arabic (my recent translation here):
Islamic researchers are agreed that what the West and its followers call “moderate Islam” and “moderate Muslims” is simply a slur against Islam and Muslims, a distortion of Islam, a rift among Muslims, a spark to ignite war among them. They also see that the division of Islam into “moderate Islam” and “radical Islam” has no basis in Islam -- neither in its doctrines and rulings, nor in its understandings or reality.
In keeping with various disturbing polls, the study found that everything associated with “radical Islam” – adherence to Islamic law (sharia), subordinate position for women and non-Muslims, draconian punishments, jihad to spread Islam, and opposition to democracy – is a reflection of authentic Islam.
Objectively speaking – from a doctrinal, historic, and even contemporary perspective – such observations are hard to deny. Yet the idea of the “moderate Muslim” continues to allure and resonate with many in the West.
Why?
Because growing numbers of Western people are unaware that they belong to a distinct civilization and unique heritage. Rather, they arrogantly see themselves as the culmination of all human history – supposed rational thinkers who’ve left all cultural and religious baggage behind. Such was the thesis of one much touted book the prophecy of which remains unfulfilled: The End of History and the Last Man.
Overlooked is that the Muslim has his own unique and ancient worldview and set of principles – which in turn prompt behavior deemed “radical” by Western (falsely assumed “universal”) standards.
Such thinking is further arrogant and ethnocentric – two things liberals always warn against yet constantly do. While the conservative acknowledges that Islam has its own principles, the liberal ignores these, believing instead that Muslims “are just like us.” This view, which arrogantly brushes aside Islam’s role in the Muslim’s life, doesn’t seem ethnocentric because the “us” is believed to be not particular (Western or Christian), but universal. This arrogance has gotten to the point that whenever Muslims behave in “radical” ways antithetical to Western standards – but consistent with traditional Islam – the West concludes that they must be mentally insane.
Faith in moderate Islam is faith in the notion that a human can be both secular and Muslim at the same time. Portraying what at root is a Christian paradigm as “universal,” and then applying it to an alien culture like Islam, is doomed to failure. Christians can and always have lived and thrived in secular or even anti-Christian environments because Christian teachings transcend the law and render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.
Conversely, Islam and the law are one and the same; without the law, Islam is meaningless. The Arabic word Islam literally means “submit.” Submit to what? Allah’s commandments as codified in sharia and derived from the Koran (literal words of Allah) and Hadith (words and deeds of Islam’s prophet Muhammad). And these commandments – from death to the apostate and blasphemer to jihad and subjugation for the infidel – are anything but “Western.”
In the final analysis, “moderate Islam” is really nothing less than an Islam without Islam – or “Western Islam,” an oxymoron – explaining why it is viewed with great scorn outside the West (even London’s first Muslim mayor disparagingly refers to moderate Muslims as “Uncle Toms”). The idea that Muslims can be true to their religion and yet naturally fit into Western society is false – and built on an equally false premise: that Christianity, Islam’s historic archenemy, somehow also had to moderate itself to fit into a secular society –when, in fact, Christian principles were fundamental to the creation of the West
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