Why Islam Is a Religion of Peace

In case you missed it, there's a passage in Abu Bakr Naji's The Management of Savagery (I posted about here) that goes:

One who previously engaged in jihad knows that it is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism, frightening [others] and massacring—I am talking about jihad and fighting, not about Islam and one should not confuse them.

I added italics, because that caveat is the key to understanding a lot of what is going on. Bloody jihad is "outside Islam". Muslims may go and do it, but it is not a part of their faith. They do it despite their faith you see, in order to support their faith, but it's not within their faith.

Well-known is the idea of taqiya, or the virtue of lying to non-Muslims for the right reasons. This is broken down into "prudential taqiyya," which is hiding one's faith or actions such as pretending to convert to (say) Catholicism when in fear for one's life, as well as "non-prudential taqiyya," described as protecting deep mysteries of the faith and so forth from non-Muslims.

I'm willing to bet that taqiya underpins the double-talk distinction between jihad and Islam. I mean, it's obvious once you see it.

It's similar to the notion of legalistic answers to questions vs. just plain answers. If a crime has been expunged from your record, you are not required to answer "yes" if asked if you have ever been convicted of a crime. See, there's the actual answer, and then the legal answer.

Moving right past Clintonian whoppers and Obama formulations, there's another application here, which I suspect, and that is the U.S. Intelligence community. They have clearances so high and so important and in such secrecy that I bet they have internal legal dispensation to answer questions from Congress, from courts, from others in the Executive whom you would think have the right to a straight answer -- with stone-faced lies. Vindman O-HO SAY CAN YOU SEE gave the game up when he said, proudly, that his ultimate duty was to the, uh, Interagency Community or something like that. Big Intel. It's all so much taqiya, for the jihad, for the submission to the state. USlamic G'had.

I see you!

So keep the taqiya-jihad linkage in mind, and how it ostensibly separates the faith from the atrocities which merely support the faith, and check out @GrannyDude's short post introducing the chilling, banal captured jihadi responses to questioning about the attacks on 10/7.