There are only a handful of authors alive today whose ideas about geopolitics have won respect in both the world of Islam and in the West. One of those authors is Howard Bloom.
His first book, 1995’s The Lucifer Principle, predicted a nuclear Iran. And his 2000 book Global Brain, warned about a man named Osama bin Laden and a group called the Taliban. His new book The Muhammad Code: How a Desert Prophet Brought you ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram—or How Muhammad invented Jihad, is the story of how a desert prophet set us up for a nuclear Iran and an atomic successor to Osama.
Howard Bloom has debated one-one-one with senior officials from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Gaza’s Hamas on Iran’s global Arab-language Alalam TV News Network. And Sheikh Muhammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler, who doubles as the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, has named a racehorse after one of Bloom’s books.
Bloom’s second book Global Brain was the subject of an Office of the Secretary of Defense symposium in 2010, with participants from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. And the Department of Defense’s SENSIAC Military Sensing Symposium relied on Bloom to explain how to see the world through the eyes of Osama bin Laden.
Bloom’s 199 appearances on North America’s highest rated overnight talk radio show, Coast to Coast AM, a show that airs on 500 of the continent’s leading radio stations, have covered everything from the Gulf War and 9/11 to the Fort Hood shootings, the Arab Spring, and the Syrian civil war. In addition, Bloom has dissected headline issues over 40 times on Saudi Arabia’s KSA2-TV, Saudi Arabi’s Ekhbariya TV, and on Iran’s global English language PressTV.
Grégoire Canlorbe: In a market overwhelmed with books on Islam, what is unique about The Muhammad Code?
Howard Bloom: The Muhammad Code tells a story quite unknown in the West, namely the story of the only founder of a major religion ever to call himself “the Prophet of War”[i] and to command 65 military campaigns. It tells the story of how that prophet set our ancestors in the West up for over 1,300 years of attack and enslavement, the story of how he laid the groundwork for the destruction of superpowers far more potent than the United States, and the story of how he started the longest-running world war in history. And most important, The Muhammad Code tells the story of how that prophet demands that his never-ending war be turned today against the ideals we hold dear in the West—human rights, gender equality, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of trade, entrepreneurship, pluralism, and democracy.
Millions of Muslims envision Islam as a religion of tolerance, pluralism, and peace. But there’s a blunt fact staring us in the face. What ISIS is doing is merely one attack in the world’s longest running world war—the war of “Mohammed the Conqueror” and the “knights” of Islam, as Bin Laden used to say, against every other civilization on the face of the planet. For Allah and His Messenger demand that Muslims be on top. They demand that Muslims allow others to live only if they take a role as second-class citizens in a purely Muslim state and pay the jizya, a tax designed to shame and humiliate. And they demand that Islam rule every inch of land on God’s own speck of dust—the planet Earth. So Muslims in the West can never be happy. At least not according to the standards of the Hadith and the Qur’an. Not according to the standards of al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Iranian Islamic Revolution, and the Islamic State. That is, good Muslims cannot be happy until Shariah rules every land. And that includes your land and mine.
Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil’s ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities are often the generators of the actions we most abhor—murder, torture, genocide and war. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to tear each other apart. From our devotion to a higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. And from our commitment to ideals come our excuses to hate. Righteousness in Islam consists in following Muhammad’s footsteps. And those footsteps are violent, imperialist, colonialist, sadistic, and genocidal. But those who want to “annihilate” or to convert their fellow men in the West are not madmen. They’re rational and they’re something more—they’re idealists. They want to free us. They want to save you and me.
As they see it, you and I were made from a clot of blood by Allah, by God. We were given everything we have by Him. Since we are His creations, we will experience true justice and peace only if we live by His laws and are enlightened by His truths. What are those laws and truths? The ones that God himself gave to Mohammed in the seventh century. Islam is out to save you and me in an even more profound way. If we are tricked into following false laws, believing in false gods, and sticking to what Osama bin Laden used to call false “opinions, orders [and] theories”[ii], we will go to an unspeakably painful hell. Our earthly life is but a brief interlude, a brief gift, a brief test to see if we can follow God’s path. But hell and heaven are forever.
Islamic militants want to save you so you can spend the time that really matters, the time that lasts the longest, the time from your death to the Day Of Judgement, in the luxurious upper rooms of paradise. Only if your eyes are opened to the legacy of Mohammed, only if you are persuaded to drop all other “opinions, orders, theories and religions” can Islam save you. What happens if you stubbornly refuse Islam? What happens if you cannot be won over to the light? You must be wiped out. You must be kept from corrupting the minds of others and dragging them down to hell with you.
When former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threw a press conference in September 2006 to report on his visit to Senegal, Cuba, Venezuela and the United Nations, he said, “And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism.”[iii] He’d also made the same word-for-word statement the previous year.[iv] It is very unlikely that Ahmadinejad was proposing a thought experiment. He was proposing a reality that Iran and its fellow Muslim states would be able to achieve with their coming weaponry. And with the existing 120 Islamic nuclear bombs of Pakistan.[v] Bombs that could easily fall into the hands of ISIS.
Islam has called for the annihilation of the Jews for close to 1,400 years. But why eradicate those of us who live in America? My suspicion is this. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Abubakar Shekau, and Islamic militants from Iran to Indonesia and from Trinidad to Dearborn, Michigan, feel that Europe is eager to appease the Muslim world, eager to bow to Islam’s will. Europe can be saved. Europe can be brought into the fold of Islam. But America stubbornly insists on promoting its Satanic culture, a culture that will drag millions down to the pit of fire. Hit America with a few nuclear weapons, take out New York, Washington, and a handful of other American coastal cities, and those left in America will embrace Islam. What’s more, the weak-willed Europeans will finally see the truth and will accept second-rate status in something god promised Mohammed long ago—Islam’s global empire.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Besides your concern for the survival of the modern Western civilization, how did you come to have a properly scientific interest in Islam? Does it have anything to do with your personal history?
Howard Bloom: My introduction to Islamic culture came in 1962. My parents and grandparents were Zionists—people who wished ardently for the right of Jews to return to a homeland that appears in a flood of Hebrew prayers, the Promised Land, the Hebrew territory from which Jews were expelled over and over again and which the Jews stubbornly rebelled to retake in 66 AD, 133 AD, 351 AD, 438 AD, and 614 AD.[vi] Those Jews, my ancestors, battled the biggest imperialists of the day, the Romans. Rome periodically got fed up with Jewish freedom fighters and removed most of the Hebrews from the land Jews had inhabited since 1,200 BC.[vii] Rome scattered this remnant across the face of the Old World. Yet Jews insistently trickled back into what they considered their native land again, and by 636 AD,[viii] Arab historians say these Hebrew returnees and the Jews still on the land of Judea had built 41 cities[ix] in what is today called Palestine and Israel.
[Read more…] about A conversation with Howard Bloom, for Gatestone Institute
Waleed Al-Husseini is a Palestinan blogger and essayist as well as the founder of the Ex-Muslim Counsel of France. He garnered international fame in 2010 when he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured for articles he posted in which he criticized Islam. He has received threats and death threats. He is one of the most celebrated cyber-activists from the Arab world and now lives in France where he sought refuge. He continues to be a fierce defender of its secular, republican values.