Reader defends the Muslim race by Peter Burrows 1017/23 elburropete@gmail.com 

Last Friday, October 13, I posted in the online newspaper The Grant County Beat a link to my article, “Would the world be better off with no Jews or no Muslims?” This was an update to a 3/8/2022 article and was prompted by the recent Hamas attack on Israel.  

There was only one reader response, an email addressed to both myself and the editor of The Grant County Beat.  If it had been addressed only to myself, I wouldn’t be sharing it. Since it was also addressed to the editor, I assume the writer had no expectation of privacy and in fact may have wanted her letter to be published in the Beat.  (I have deleted her phone number. I doubt she wanted THAT public.)

For reasons that should be obvious, the editor decided not to post the reader’s opinions. I don’t have any such inhibitions and I think a hard-hitting criticism of my work might be enjoyed by many of you. First, you may want to read what so infuriated her:  

https://wordpress.com/post/silvercityburro.com/1149

Email from Shannon Salcedo, 10/13/23 

“It is the Muslims who are the worst of people and the Jews who are the best of people. I think it’s time the world recognized those facts.”  

This was thee most UNHINGED racist article I EVER read in my life, and Peter Burrows and the Editor have embarrassed the entire SW region of NM for having the gall to post this ignorant pile of manure. I would suggest to Mr. Burrows to get our of his dirty-poverty stricken-drug addled-government corrupt-County and meet other people. Sh*t, meet people who practice other religions bc he literally cherry picked a bag of sh*t and developed an article to demonize an entire race of people, and the editor green-lighted it. This Article of Idiocy makes me SOO happy I moved out of Grant County, and left the church, and only visit 3x a year bc these people are dumb and feed on ignorance.  

Mr. Burrows reeks of arrogance, privilege and hate in this article, and fails to realize he is a dinosaur on the verge of extinction. So, let me help fix this terrible headline for Mr. Burrows: 

“It is the Boomers who are the worst of people and the Gen-Z’rs who are the best of people. I think it’s time the world recognized those facts.” 

I plan on sharing this article with my 18yo daughter and all of her friends in Denver, just to remind them all how important it is to vote. People like Mr. Burrows are the type who will gladly deny a U.S. Tax Paying Citizen of any civil rights bc he’s white and privileged and has a nice pension. His writings are atrocious.  

Boomers like Mr. Burrows are the greatest threat to democracy and the environment, and his article continues to prove my valid point. “The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin,” – Sen. John McCain and the only difference between Libertarians’ and Republicans is weed. 

To The Editor: If you need content writers, please contact me, I can help you. I’m currently working on —– (Deleted: Two paragraphs of suggested local topics the Beat should have articles about.) 

You don’t need to post racist hate filled articles on your site like this one. There’s tons of material to work with in Grant Co. for a great article. Just talk to the people. That’s what I did when I was in Bayard in late Sept. early Oct. and I have a world of content to write about. You need to put Mr. Burrows terrible content in a place NO ONE can find on your web-page. And keep it there. Sincerely, Shannon Salcedo C: (—) — —-E: shannon.salcedo@yahoo.com  

Here is my email response to Ms. Salcedo and the Beat editor: I would like to thank Shannon Salcedo for a thoughtful, reasoned and fact-filled analysis of my article. I especially wish to thank Salcedo for apparently assuming that Islam is a race. Most people don’t know that, and I think people of the Lutheran race and, especially, people of the Catholic race should take note of that insight. 

Shannon Salcedo then sent another email to myself and the Beat editor, although I don’t think it was a response to my email to her: 

You know, I should’ve calmed down before emailing you about your Article of Ignorance that I had read, but I was SO shocked. I’m used to seeing this kind if trash on Reddit or The Daily Caller. Rush Limbaugh would be proud of you, and he was a disgusting pig. 

Religion is cancer.  

Those who demonize groups of people over a Religion that is not the preferred by “Christians” are worse than a stage 4 colon cancer.  

Your Facebook page is dumpster fire of MAGA-chud talking points: 

1. Demonize minorities (you REALLY don’t like black people, OR Hispanics, Democrat voters, women, etc.)  

2. Climate denier (AZ and NM will run dry in 15yrs, CO river is toast) 

3. Obsessed w MSNBC headlines  

4. No minorities in your “FRIENDS” group. ALL whites. And old.  

You deserve to house and support every drug addicted baby born in Grant County; eat diesel exhaust and drink Bayard water for the rest of your days. My daughter and her generation will tell the next ones of how YOUR generation tried to kill them all w ignorance and greed, all so you could help Big Oil frack your back yard so you can run your a/c when its 150⁰ in June.  
Shannon Salcedo C: (—) — —- E: shannon.salcedo@yahoo.com 

Here is my response, which Ms. Salcedo has not yet answered.   

The religion you are defending commands – commands — the death penalty for gays, adulterers, apostates, and anybody who doesn’t convert to the religion of Islam or refuses to be ruled by the religion of Islam.  It also allows husbands to beat their wives, fathers to kill their children with no penalty, and lots of other sweet stuff like that. 

Are you defending Islam because you think it is a race? Islam is no more race than Christianity is a race, and Islam, like Christianity, has adherents who represent all the races of the world.  

You should learn something about Islam before you defend it. Maybe you could buy a Koran and read it. (I recommend the Mawdudi translation.) If you know HOW to read the Koran it will save you a lot of time.  Here’s a 20-minute guide, Intro to Summary: https://wordpress.com/post/silvercityburro.com/749 

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Would the world be better off with no Jews, or with no Muslims? By Peter Burrows  10/16/23

In the Koran, which is the eternal and infallible word of God, we are told that Jews and Christians are “the worst of creatures.” God then tells us that Muslims are the “best of creatures.” Elsewhere in the Koran, God clarifies that Muslims are not just the best relative to Jews and Christians, but that Muslims are “the best of people ever raised up for mankind.” 

God also tells us that between Jews and Christians, it is the Jews who are “the most hostile” to Muslims while Christians “are closest to feeling affection” for Muslims. Thus, of the two “worst of creatures,” God leaves no doubt that the worst of the worst are the Jews. 

These revelations, some 1400 years ago, came at the beginning of Islam while Judaism had been around for hundreds of years.  The Jews obviously far outnumbered the Muslims then, but Muslims are fierce proselytizers, and in only a decade or two they outnumbered the Jews, who are anything but fierce proselytizers.  Today, the world population of Muslims is about 1.8 billion and the Jews only about 15.2 million, a ratio of over 100 to one.  

The Koran, however, does not say that Muslims were destined to be the MOST people, but that they are, and always will be, the BEST people. Since the Allah of Islam is all-knowing, all-wise, omniscient and omnipotent, surely after 1400 years He has enabled His Muslims to achieve a stunning array of achievements.   

At the very least, we should see these achievements reflected in the number of Nobel Prizes received by Muslims.  The Nobel Prize has been awarded since 1901 for accomplishments in physics, chemistry, and medicine. Economics was added in 1968. These are what I call the objective prizes. The two subjective prizes are for literature and peace.  

Since 1901, 609 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 975 people (prizes are frequently awarded to joint efforts) and Muslims have received – Drum Roll Please – THIRTEEN!! Of those, only three were in the sciences, seven were Peace Prizes, three for literature. None of those were awarded to Saudi Arabians, who have preserved the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for 1400 years and could be considered the best of the best. In fact, not one Saudi has even been nominated for a Nobel.  

How does that compare to the Nobels received by the worst of the worst, the Jews? Wikipedia estimates that Jewish recipients were at least 20 percent of “over 900” recipients, and a Jewish organization estimates the number is “at least” 210. To be conservative, and to simplify the math, let’s assume that the number is 195, or 20 percent of the 975 recipients.  

That would mean that Jews, who are outnumbered by Muslims over one hundred to one, receive 15 times as many Noble Prizes. If my math is correct, that makes Jews FIFTEEN HUNDRED TIMES better than Muslims. If we just count the Nobels won in the sciences since 2000, which doesn’t count literature or peace prizes, the Jews outnumber the Muslims by 52 to one. (Fifty-two hundred times better?)  

Nobel Prizes are only one criterion to judge “best” people. Music, for example, is an area where the Jewish contribution to America, and the world, is endless, from Gershwin to Billy Joel to Itzhak Perlman. Very few know that both “White Christmas” and “God Bless America” were written by a Jew, Russian-born Israel Isidore Beilin, aka Irving Berlin.  Since Muhammad declared music to be sinful, the Muslim contribution to music has been zero.  

On the other side of the coin, how do the two religions compare in crimes against humanity as opposed to contributions to humanity? Here, there is no question that Muslims are far ahead of Jews. No group of people have been more murderous than the followers of Islam. While it is true that the followers of Karl Marx have caused an impressive amount of mayhem, they were not fellow Jews. The Torah and the Talmud do not command Jews to forever wage war against unbelievers, as the Koran does for Muslims.  

I use the word “forever” even though the Muslim holy war, jihad, will cease when Muslims make Islam “prevail over all religions, howsoever those who associate others with Allah in His Divinity might detest it.”  After 1400 years, Muslims are still only about 23 percent of the world’s population, so they continue to soldier on. Last month, September of 2023, there were 104 attacks in 22 countries that killed 550 and injured 482. Six of those attacks were suicide bombings.

Those numbers are from thereligionofpeace.com and I shudder to think what the final October numbers will be.

Since the spectacular jihad attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, there have been over 41,000 such attacks. Last year, 2022, “there were 1993 Islamic attacks in 52 countries, in which 9002 people were killed and 6715 injured..”  I couldn’t find the totals since 9/11/2001 on The Religion of Peace website, but those numbers would just reinforce the overwhelming evidence that the only thing Muslims are good at is killing innocent people.  

So, let us return to the question: would the world be better off with no Jews or no Muslims? I think the evidence is overwhelming that the Koran got it exactly backwards. It is the Muslims who are the worst of people and the Jews who are the best of people. I think it’s time the world recognized those facts.  

p.s. A note on my personal bias. When I was a kid, I wanted to play the clarinet like Benny Goodman and had a crush on opera star Roberta Peters, both Jews.  Seventy years later, I still want to play like Benny but I’ve ditched Roberta in favor of Julie Budd. She’s Jewish, too. 

Sources:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim_Nobel_laureates

https://www.newsweek.com/imams-called-death-jews-trump-jerusalem-announcement-776941

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-nobel-prize-laureates

https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/attacks.aspx?Yr=2022

Toward Understanding the Qur’an, Sayyid Mawdudi translation, verses 98:6, 98:7, 3:110, 5:82, 9:33. 

Reliance of the Traveller, f40.0, Music, Song, and Dance, pgs. 774-776 

Note to readers: Amazon had this as the top critical review until December 1, when it was removed. There had been six who had found it “helpful.” I can only speculate as to why it was removed, but, regardless, it is censorship.

Book review: “A Concise Guide to the Quran – Answering Thirty Critical Questions,” by Ayman S. Ibrahim, 2020, 176 pgs. $19 Amazon. Reviewed by Peter Burrows 10/4/2023 

Ibrahim was born in Egypt and raised in a Coptic Christian family. He grew up surrounded by Muslims in a society steeped in Islam.  His public schooling had heavy doses of Islamic history, Arabic and Quranic scripture.  He has two PhDs in Islamic Studies, one from Fuller Theological Seminary (USA) and the other from University of Haifa (Israel) He is Professor of Islamic Studies and director of the Jenkins Center for the Christian Understanding of Islam at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Bottom line: Professor Ibrahim is very knowledgeable, which makes him extremely dangerous because he teaches that Islam can be reformed into a nonmilitant, nonthreatening religion — and he is wrong! 

Initially, I thought this was probably a matter of economic necessity.  After all, I doubt there is a professor of religious studies in North America who is allowed to teach the truth about Islam. (I hope somebody proves me wrong. Hillsdale?) But then, on page 116, he reveals a distressing and dangerous misunderstanding of Islam: 

“In the spring of 2018, I led a group of American students on a teaching trip to Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn has the largest Muslim population in the United States. Many of my American students had never entered a mosque, so I decided to take them to a mosque in the city. I also wanted them to hear about Islam from a Muslim. I hoped to break their fear of the unknown, in this case, Islam and Muslims.” 

Two things are wrong here: (1) A proper understanding of Islam should INSTILL a fear of Islam and Muslims; (2) Learning about Islam from a Muslim, especially an imam, is the worst way to learn about Islam.  

I can only conclude that Professor Ibrahim either has huge holes in his knowledge about Islam, or else he is simply incapable of seeing the truth about Islam, for whatever reason. Islamic law, Sharia, dictates that Muslims must wage war, jihad, against unbelievers until the world is ruled by Islam. If it requires lying to the non-believers in order to achieve this goal, lying is obligatory. No Muslim can question this. 

Under penalty of apostasy, for which the divine punishment is death, no Muslim can befriend a non- Muslim. The fact that Dr Ibrahim has a dear childhood friend who is a Muslim only proves that this particular Muslim is probably a decent person. Probably. The fact that the Muslim friend hasn’t been killed for his friendship with a Christian could conceivably be because he has persuaded his would-be Muslim assassins that he is engaged in deceiving Dr Ibrahim and for proof, just look at what Ibrahim writes and teaches about Islam!   

Islamic law, sharia, is almost completely ignored by Ibrahim. He mentions sharia twice in the body of the text, and then only in passing, and once in the glossary. Sharia rules Islam and sharia dictates that any Muslim who has an opinion about anything in the Quran that differs from traditional scholarly opinion is an apostate, and apostates “deserve to die.” (Reliance of the Traveller, A Classic Manuel of Islamic Sacred Law, pg. 596)  

In addition, Muhammad warned: “Whoever speaks of the Book of Allah (the Koran) from his own opinion is in error” (Reliance of the Traveller, pg. 751.), and the Koran Verse 33:36 tells Muslims, “ it is not for a believer, man or woman, when Allah and his messenger have decreed a matter that they should have any option in their decision.” (Khan – Al-Hilali translation.)   

Therefore, it is delusional to contend, as Ibrahim repeatedly does, that individual Muslims can have opinions that differ from sharia and that these opinions can lead to fundamental changes in Islam. He refers to such Muslims as “modern,” “progressive,” “liberal,” and that these Muslims can “legitimately” practice their own versions of Islam.  Such Muslims are either apostates or propagandists engaged in deceiving gullible infidels. 

He writes, “— one should be thankful for the modernist Muslim thinkers of recent years, especially in the west. They swim against the tide in opposing traditional Muslim claims. Their interpretation seeks to advance values of mutual respect, peacebuilding and religious freedom between Muslims and non-Muslims. They read Quranic statements about fighting non-Muslims, jihad, and violence as merely remnants of the past. They believe these statements are descriptive not prescriptive.” 

Precisely what we “should be thankful for” escapes me since the only thing these so-called Muslims have accomplished is to promote the deception that Islam is in fact peaceful or that Islam can be changed. Islam cannot be changed; it must be rejected. What these people are describing is not the religion of Islam. Perhaps some of them, such as Zuhdi Jasser, are sincere, but most are knowingly deceiving non-Muslims into accepting the cancer of Islam into their societies. 

In a couple of areas, Ibrahim’s scholarship appears to be severely lacking. He contends, for example, that the Satanic Verses were abrogated when they were eliminated. There’s a big difference between eliminating a verse in the Quran because it was not a revelation from Allah and abrogating it because Allah had a “better” revelation at a later date.  

He also seems to think that the doctrine of abrogation is debatable, which it isn’t. The Reliance of the Traveller on page 626 has as a requirement for being an Islamic judge a knowledge of both abrogated and abrogating verses. On page 752 the layman is warned not to interpret the Koran without such knowledge. 

To question, deny or ignore abrogation is a standard tactic of those who defend Islam. At least twice, Ibrahim cites abrogated verses without mentioning they are abrogated and therefore invalid, which is inexcusable. (2:190 which authorizes jihad only in self-defense, abrogated by 9:36 or 9:5; and 29:46, which says use only peaceful persuasion with People of the Scripture, abrogated by 9:29 which says to strive against them until they are “utterly subdued.”)   

He even claims some Muslims think that Chapter 9 may not belong in the Quran because it lacks the introduction that other chapters have. I have never read of such a doubt.  Chapter 9 is the penultimate and most militaristic chapter in the Quran, and for a Muslim to assert it may not belong in the Quran is apostasy on steroids.  

An especially distressing example of poor scholarship is his description on page 91 of verse 9:30: “The Jews say, Uzayr is the son of Allah, while Christians say, the Christ is the son of Allah —.” Ibrahim then writes: “Of course, no one knows who this Uzayr is.”   

When I read this I said to myself, “Which version of the Quran has this guy actually read?” One of the Qurans he mentions is the Khan-Hilal translation, a 1990’s translation published in Saudi Arabia, in which verse 9:30 reads, “And the Jews say: Uzair (Ezra) is the son of Allah —.” Another translation he mentions is the 1930 Pickthall translation in which 9:30 simply reads: “And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah–” 

One translation he doesn’t mention is my personal favorite, “Towards Understanding the Quran,’ a translation completed in 1973 by the Pakistani scholar Sayyid Mawdudi. In it, 9:30 reads: “The Jews say Ezra (‘Uzayr) is Allah’s son —.” Of my four Qurans, only the 1934 Yusif Ali translation fails to identify “Uzair” as the Jewish prophet Ezra – who was NEVER worshiped as a son of God by the Jews, another proof that the all-knowing “Allah” needed an editor. 

In spite of these puzzling gaps in the author’s knowledge, there are some parts of the book which are outstanding. I give Five stars to Part 1 in which he effectively refutes the standard Islamic narrative concerning the history of the Quran. He ends this section by writing, “Without a doubt, the traditional Muslim claims about an unchanged and unchanging Quran will eventually come back to hurt the Muslim cause.”  

Unfortunately, he doesn’t reach the same conclusion when answering his question number 26: “What does the Quran say about Jihad and fighting?” While he concedes the Quran ordains fighting, he dismisses the importance of this by claiming it’s only the literalists, such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda, who act on those verses: “But Muslims are not all the same. How do Muslims usually treat versus like these related to fighting non-Muslims?” 

How Muslims “usually” treat the militant verses in the Quran is irrelevant. They have a religious obligation to obey those verses and in Muslim-ruled nations this is unquestioned. The only reason those nations are not in open warfare with non-Muslim nations is because they know they couldn’t win such a war — yet. 

There’s much more I could criticize in detail, e.g., his attempt to deflect the reality of jihad by noting it can also mean an internal struggle for salvation, which is true but hardly relevant, or his contention that Muslims who advocate following only the Quran, “People of the Quran,” offer a glimmer of hope, as though the Quran isn’t bad enough.    

Bottom line: this is not a concise guide to the Quran but more a concise guide to wishful thinking about Islam. For a truly concise guide to the Koran and Islam as it really is, spend 20 minutes or so, Introduction to Conclusion (Appendices extra): https://wordpress.com/post/silvercityburro.com/749