Senator John McCain posing with jihadi nut-jobs in Syria in May 2013
Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and steady yourself, when politicians who should know better make incredibly stupid and quite untrue statements.
American Senator John McCain tried to make out that the Islamic war cry ‘Allah hu Akhbar’ is not a war cry. In an interview with Fox News, Senator McCain defended the Jihadist fighters in Syria, and said that they were ‘moderates’. He also said that the words Allah hu Akhbar’ were no different from a Christian saying, as an exclamation ‘My God!’ This as Robert Spencer points out, is patently untrue.
The way that Allah Hu Akhbar’ (which means that the Islamic deity Allah is the ‘greatest’, not ‘great’ as the Islamists and the Left would have you believe) is used is a way of instilling terror in the non-believers.
Allah Hu Akhbar is used by Muslim terrorists when they are cutting off peoples heads with a bread knife, or flying planes into buildings or murdering scores of people in a market or a school. It is not the equivalent of the expressions of surprise, alarm or thanks that are used by other religions. Allah Hu Akhbar is the Islamic analogue of the sort of verbal terror used by the dictators of the 1930’s. It is an expression of power and hatred no different from the right arm salute or the singing of the Horst Wessel Song.
Senator McCain’s description of ‘Allah Hu Akhbar’ as something innocuous can be easily disproved, and it is surprising that someone like him, with probably a lot of back room intellectual back up, could say this. Bearing in mind that there are pictures purporting to show Senator McCain posing for pictures with Syrian fighters who are probably jihadists, it is highly likely that he was fed some bullshit by these fighters which he failed to check later. Taking information from a single source and erroneously relying on it, is a mistake which we have all made at some point in our lives. But our mistakes do not have the sort of monstrous outcomes that mistakes made by people like Senator McCain can have.
This verbal mistake by Senator McCain throws up questions about the reasons he said this. Did he just accept the Islamic lie that this phrase meant ‘Oh God’ but was too lazy to either check or have his staff check it? Or does he truly believe that the groups that will gain the most from American intervention in Syria are not jihadists or led by jihadists? If it is the first then he is incompetent. To not check something like this before gobbing off could be a sign that he is mentally unfit for office, and he should go. If the second reason applies then he has truly, for motives he alone knows, departed from the realm of reason and is helping to put the USA on a catastrophic path.
McCain is helping the USA intervene on behalf of the enemies not only of America itself, but of the rest of the non-Muslim world as well. Liberal interventionism can work and there have been times, such as during the Rwandan Genocide, where force should have been used but wasn’t. Toppling Saddam Hussain was the right thing to do but should have been done earlier. Going into Syria not to prevent a genocide or topple a vicious tyrant but to give an advantage to those who hate us and want to kill us, is stupidity of the highest order.
It is sad, knowing Senator McCain’s war and pubic service record, to see him backing this forthcoming foreign policy disaster, one created and nurtured by the government of President Barack Obama, a man so obviously unfitted for the office of President of the United States. It is surprising and shocking to see a man of Senator McCain’s character behaving in this way. John McCain has failed to be the ‘maverick’ that he has been described as. He has succumbed to the pandering to Islamic ideologues that is a hallmark of President Obamas term of office.
Links
Report on Senator McCain’s mistake from Front Page Magazine
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/john-mccain-what-an-embarrassment/
Senator McCain meets rebels of t he ‘Free Syrian Army’ who may or may not be Islamic psychopaths.
http://fox40.com/2013/05/27/sen-mccain-visits-rebels-in-syria/
Wiki Biog of Senator McCain. Here we have a classic example of a good man gone to the bad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain
While accusing him of spreading misinformation and ignorance you sent out a lot of it yourself. I’m a military veteran and I’ve been studying Arabic for years. “Allah hu Akbar” means BOTH “God is Great” and “God is the Greatest”, and “Allah” just means “the God” and even Arabic speaking Jews and Christians use it. But I’m glad you know so much Arabic to inform us the definitions here.
McCain IS wrong, saying it means “Thank God” but, he’s right in a way because sometimes it can be used that way. Pass your driver’s test? Allah hu Akbar. A new baby was born? Allah hu akbar. It’s used for any occasion that you’re happy for. So yes a terrorist would use it when he’s happy some evil thing has happened. But a normal Muslim, finding out your mom just survived cancer would also say Allah hu Akbar. Please pick up a book instead of spreading hate, how does that make you different from them?
Thank you for your comment. How is telling the truth about Islam ‘spreading hate’? The use of the phrase ‘Allah is greatest’ does mean that the speaker is placing the Islamic deity ahead of everyone else’s. OK many other religions have a similar belief that their deity is the only one, but these faiths do not shout ‘No-one gets to the father unless through me’ or ‘or Baruch HaShem’ with the intention of using it as a ‘war cry’.
Like it or not the majority of times that people encounter the Allah hu Akbar phrase is in news reports when jihadists are firing missiles or sawing peoples heads off with a bread knife. It is a phrase that chills me to the marrow whenever I hear it.
Although I know that every religion has its expressions of faith and thanks, and although in everyday use, Allah hu akbar is used as an expression of thanks, that doesn’t remove the fact that it is used as a war cry. It may well be an expression used with innocent intent, but far too often it is not used with innocent intent, as any perusal of some of the video coming out of the Syrian rebels will show.
I’ve read plenty of stuff about Islam and I’m afraid that I’ve had to reluctantly come to the conclusion that although individual Muslims may be fine upstanding people (and should therefore be protected from harm), the ideology of Islam is not. I’m no qualified Arabist, unlike yourself, but I understand the concept of ‘root words’, a feature common to both Arabic and Hebrew (also Aramaic for that matter), and I know that ‘Kabir’ the root of Akbar, means ‘great’ but when combined with the name of the Islamic deity becomes ‘greatest’.
I certainly concur that Allah Hu Akbar is used as an expression of thanks and that Senator McCain used it wrongly, but it is equally not wrong to point this out.
With regards to spreading hate, I think you will find that much more hatred than I could ever spread in a lifetime is coming from the mouths and the pens of Islamic supremacists.
The phrase ‘god is greatest’ would not be a problem if it was only used to give thanks to a deity, in the situations that you give, in that case it would be the equivalent of ‘Thank God’ or ‘Baruch HaShem’. However it is a problem when it is used as a war cry and is something that is screamed by savages whilst they are decapitating, stabbing, shooting or blowing up innocent people.