Jihad against Buddhism

A chilling article from American Thinker. 

 Is The Fate of the Infidels Tied to the Buddhas?
By Janet Levy

One of the ancient Buddhas destroyed as 'idols'

"No fanfare and little notice marked the 10th anniversary earlier this year of the destruction of the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas.  These 6th-century stately statues carved into sandstone cliffs in central Afghanistan included one of the tallest standing Buddhas in the world.  On March 12, 2001, the 180- and 121-foot Buddhas crumpled under dynamite set off by the Taliban -- the Islamist militia group ruling Afghanistan from 1996 through late 2001.  Mullah Omar, the leader of the Al Qaeda-supported movement, deemed the statutes idolatrous graven images insulting to Islam and ordered their destruction.  Other Buddhist images, including statues and relief carvings as well as ancient Sikh gurdwaras and Hindu temples, were also destroyed by the Islamic terrorists belonging to the Taliban Movement.

This kind of cultural destruction has been part and parcel of Islam since its inception.  According to Dr. Bill Warner, founder of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, "Political Islam has annihilated every culture it has invaded or immigrated to by destroying the host culture."

Dr. Warner cites the extinction of a once-Christian Middle East, Turkey, and North Africa, and a Zoroastrian Persia, as a result of Islamic jihad.  He also includes the decimation of Hindus and Buddhists as well.  All told, he totals more than 270 million "nonbelievers," including Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Africans, and Jews, who have died in Islamic massacres since the birth of Islam 1400 years ago.

Prior to the Islamic conquests, which began in the 7th century, Afghanistan was primarily Hindu with significant minorities of Buddhists and Jains...

...By the 11th century, the region that includes modern-day Afghanistan had been Islamized and the remaining Hindus and Buddhists were stripped of their legal and social rights and relegated to dhimmi status.  This meant they were required to exist under shariah or Islamic doctrine and forced to pay the jizya, a tax payable to Muslims to guarantee protection against forced conversion or death.

When the Taliban came to power in 1996, Hindu and Buddhist minorities were forced to identify themselves by wearing yellow badges and the women were required to wear burkas.  The destruction of the Buddhas was yet another attempt to demoralize and humiliate Hindus and Buddhists and destroy their culture...

Read it all here


Understanding Sharia and Jihadist attitudes towards Buddhists
To put this cultural destruction in context, we need to remember that Jihadism, by its very nature, is obsessed with hatred against non-believers and their culture.

Sharia law states that  non-believers must either be converted, or enslaved and humiliated as second-class citizens (dhimmis), or exterminated.


Christians and Jews are the only people eligible for dhimmi status, being allowed to live under Sharia laws provided they pay the extortionate jizya 'protection' money and suffer institutionalised humiliation uncomplainingly.  However they may not build new places of worship nor repair existing ones. 

Jews and Christians are classed as 'people of the book', and supremacist propagandists use this phrase to claim that Sharia treats them favorably by allowing them to live.

Buddhists are often given no such option.  They are 'mushrikūn' (singular: mushrik) - idolators whose religion should not be tolerated in any form.

According to the strictest interpretations of Sharia, Buddhists must either convert to Jihadism or be exterminated, and their places of worship must be obliterated. It is therefore very much in Western Buddhists' interests to resist the creeping Sharia that is slowly being imposed on the United States and Europe, even if this involves getting more involved in politics than many of us would like, and making some unusual alliances.

Why dhimmis and mushrikūn must ally against Sharia (from Jihad watch)

'Dhimmitude is the status that supremacist law, the Sharia, mandates for non-believers, primarily Jews and Christians. Dhimmis, "protected people," are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur'an's command that they "feel themselves subdued" (Sura 9:29). This denial of equality of rights and dignity remains part of the Sharia, and, as such, are part of the legal superstructure that global jihadists are laboring to restore everywhere in the third world, and wish ultimately to impose on the entire human race. 

If dhimmis complained about their inferior status, institutionalized humiliation, or poverty, their masters voided their contract and regarded them as enemies of Jihadism, fair game as objects of violence. Consequently, dhimmis were generally cowed into silence and worse. It was almost unheard-of to find dhimmis speaking out against their oppressors; to do so would have been suicide. For centuries dhimmi communities in the third world learned to live in peace with their supremacist overlords by acquiescing to their subservience. Some even actively identified with the dominant class, and became strenuous advocates for it. 

Spearheaded by dhimmi academics and self-serving advocacy groups, that same attitude of chastened subservience has entered into Western academic study of Jihadism, and from there into journalism, school textbooks, and the popular discourse. One must not point out the depredations of jihad and dhimmitude; to do so would offend the multiculturalist ethos that prevails everywhere today. To do so would endanger chances for peace and rapprochement between civilizations all too ready to clash. 

But in this era of global terrorism it must be said: this silence, this distortion, has become deadly. Before 9/11 it was easy to ignore and whitewash dhimmitude, but the atrocities changed the situation forever. In jihads throughout history, untold millions have died. Tens of millions have been uprooted from their homes. Tens of millions have been stripped of their cultural identity. To continue to gloss over the destruction wrought by jihad ideology and its attendant evil of dhimmitude is today to play into the hands of jihadists, who have repeatedly vowed to dhimmify the West and destroy any recalcitrant elements. 

While jihadist groups, even with their global diffusion, are not strong enough to realize this goal by themselves, they have a potent and destructive ally, a genuine fifth column, in the dhimmi academics and dhimmi journalists they have recruited in the West. They have succeeded in confusing millions in the West into mistaking honesty and truthfulness for bigotry, and self-defense for oppression"

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The Fate of the Infidels

Gouging and disembowelment

"There is no liquid loved by Allah more than the liquid of blood.  Whether you do it by the lamb, or you do it by a Serb, you do it by a Jew, you do it by any enemies of Allah, that drop of blood is very dear."-  Jihadist Sermon

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Coercion, intimidation, thuggery
and outright terrorism are 
intrinsic and essential features 
of Jihadism.

Jihadism is so intellectually moribund
and ethically repulsive 

that it cannot compete for followers
in a free marketplace of ideas, 
but must eliminate its competitors 

by whatever means may be necessary. 

See   No future for Buddhism in a Dhimmified World