The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (3 page)

To prep myself, I hitch-hiked from my hometown, Buffalo, New York, down to Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College, where I had friends, and spent a month in the library studying peoples of the Middle East like the Natufians of 11,000 years ago and the Nabataeans, a little-known culture who invented a system of terraced irrigation
²¹
that allowed them to successfully farm the deserts of southern Israel and the surrounding lands from 312 BC to 105 AD.
²²

Then one day, I had a shock. In the back of a library file of miscellaneous materials on the Middle East, I found several English-language pamphlets printed by the Arab League, a coalition of twelve leading Arab governments.
²³
The pamphlets tried to reach people like you and me with an extremely urgent clarification of historical errors. First off, the Holocaust, the mass murder of six million Jews by Germany’s Nazis, was a charade, a hoax. It never happened. Second, World War II had not been a confrontation started by the Germans in an effort to take over the world on behalf of a blond and blue-eyed master race. It had been started by Jews out to win the sympathy of the world and to establish the state of Israel. Third, Adolph Hitler had not been a Jew-hater. To the contrary. He’d been a Jewish puppet, a Jewish creation set in motion, once again, to achieve the establishment of a so-called Jewish homeland.

The villains behind these radical misunderstandings of history were those clever liars, those people out to dominate the world, those “sons of pigs and monkeys,”
²⁴
the Jews—my family and me.

One of my aunts had managed to survive the Holocaust’s concentration camps. One of my cousins had lost her parents, her brothers, and her sisters, and had been saved by a Catholic farm family in Poland. The rest of my family in Europe, the Shebshelovitzes of Riga, Latvia, and the Wechelefskys of Belarus, had disappeared utterly. I was under the impression that the Holocaust had been real. Very real. But the Arab League wanted me—and you--to believe otherwise.

This was one of my first introductions to the fact that another culture can have a radically different system of thought, a radically different way of seeing the world. It was also my introduction to Islamic anti-Semitism.

Where did this hatred of Jews come from? There are fewer Jews on the planet than the inhabitants of just one Moslem city, Cairo.
²⁵
Did the officials of the Arab League seriously imagine that a tribe so absurdly small could manipulate the mind of the German volk, the mass mind of the German people, and could plan and promote one of the biggest wars in history? If I was to understand just how different the world looked through the lens of another culture, I might as well study a culture that made hatred of me a central preoccupation.

For the next four decades I studied the instinctual underpinnings of war, creativity, and genocide. For the next four decades I studied mass behavior, from the mass behavior of quarks, nucleons, and galaxies to the mass behavior of reptiles, chimps, rats, birds, fish, bacteria, and human beings. And for the next four decades I used the culture of Islam as a test-case, a supreme living specimen in which to watch the instinctual forces of history at work. But living specimens can be dangerous.

In 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini toppled the Shah of Iran and started a disturbing new form of government. The Ayatollah made blunt statements about a new genocide in the making, an all-out war of true Moslems to “obliterate”
²⁶
those of us who refuse to believe. Meanwhile, there were numerous indications that Islam would soon have nuclear weapons. And the words of the Qur’an called out over and over again that “slaughter is better than tumult and oppression”
²⁷
—slaughter is better than unbelief. What’s more, the weapon God most often used in the Qur’an to punish those who disdained His message was fire. Not just any fire. But “
the fire whose fuel is Men and Stones
.”
²⁸
This phrase seemed to eerily hint that God was telling his followers to use the atomic bomb.

The Western press paid no attention to the Ayatollah’s blizzard of pronouncements that, “"Moslems have no alternative... to an armed holy war against profane governments. ...Holy war means the conquest of all non-Moslem territories.”
²⁹
They paid no attention to the fact that the Ayatollah’s words are still considered gospel in 2007, when Iran is busy building a uranium enrichment industry able to produce the key materials for nuclear weapons. The Western media also overlooked the clues that Iran may have been stockpiling nuclear warheads since the late 1990s… clues we’ll dig into later.

So in 1989, I entered four months of negotiations with George Crile, a producer at 60 Minutes. The goal? To warn America that while it slumbered in complacency, a new enemy was plotting its destruction. That new enemy was militant Islam. In the end, I put together a 40-page, single-spaced document for Crile with quotes from the Ayatollah, from activists in Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and from a wide variety of other Moslem sources indicating that the fall of Western Civilization was militant Islam’s goal and that any means—even nuclear means--were permissible. I tried to get a very alien way of thinking across to Crile. A way of thinking that makes total sense once you know its premises. A way of thinking that tells idealists—would-be savers of the human race—that their only way to save you, me, and George Crile may be mass murder.

Finally, Crile took me to dinner with his wife (who had been named the editor of
Premiere
, the film magazine, earlier that day) and his assistant. The dossier I’d put together of militant Islamic statements and their meaning had scared his assistant shitless. But Crile was charming…and aloof. Would he cover the threat of militant Islam? He wouldn’t say. The next day he flew to Saudi Arabia. When he returned, he gave his answer. No. No reason, just no.

Later Crile wrote a book—
Charlie Wilson’s War
. About what? About militant Islam. But about militant Islam as a creation of the CIA! Crile was accurate in his portrayal of the way the US had funded, armed, and trained what would eventually become al Qaeda. But Crile was wrong in his sense of history. He made the We-Did-It mistake—an error whose instinctual underpinnings and grisly consequences we’ll lay bare in a hundred pages or so. He implied that modern Islamic civilization is so weak and American civilization so all-powerful that a 1,300-year-old movement—militant Islam--is a recent genie conjured from a bottle by American intelligence agents.

That view can be fatal.

Four years later, in 1993, Moslem militants made their first attempt to topple the World Trade Center. They detonated a Ryder rental truck packed with 1,500 pounds of explosives in the Trade Center’s basement parking lot, a bomb that killed six people, injured a thousand, penetrated five underground floors, but did not topple the Twin Towers.
³⁰
In 2001, the militants were more successful. Islamic fighters commandeered four passenger jets, flew two of them into World Trade Center’s boxy skyscrapers, flew another into the Pentagon, and were prevented by the passengers of the fourth plane from destroying yet another Washington target. I stood on my roof in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and watched as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center burned and collapsed.

It was agonizing. For twelve years I’d been trying to warn of attacks of this kind. So had others. One of my books,
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History
, used Islam as one example of how ideas, social groups, biological self-destruct mechanisms, hormones of victory, and battles for status shape your fate and mine. Two Amazon.com reviewers called
The Lucifer Principle
the book that had predicted 9/11. A Moslem Amazon.com reviewer said the book was his new source of truth, his new “Bible.”
³¹

Another book I’d written and published before 9/11,
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21
^st
Century
, had focused on the way subcultures battle to take over the mass mind of a society. One chapter had zeroed in on a man only a handful of others had paid attention to, Osama bin Laden. A Pakistani Moslem reader called
Global Brain
the only book that tells it like it is about militant Islam. Yet, like other watchmen at the gates, I’d utterly failed to get my warnings across.

I did not want to fail again. So I set aside my work in the science of mass behavior and focused full-time on the puzzles of militant Islam.

Militant Islamic history is extremely hard to follow. The 4,000 pages I’d compiled on the topic were jumbled like jigsaw puzzle pieces. They refused to tell a coherent story. So when I was asked to give a speech I called Islam’s War to Save the West at the New York Military Affairs Symposium in 2004, I spent six months compiling a 159-page timeline of militant Islam from its beginning in the seventh century to the present, a timeline complete with a world map showing the reach of militant Islam’s colonialism and imperialism, a colonialism invisible to us because of its astonishing success as an indigenous culture-eraser and new-culture-shaper.

The armies and merchants of Islam, the map revealed, had achieved something you and I are never told about. They had pieced together the biggest empire in world history—twelve times the size of the conquests of Alexander the Great, five times the size of the Roman Empire, and seven times the size of the United States. The timeline finally gave the story of this extraordinary colonialist crusade, pinpointing 2,156 key moves along the 1,380-year-long Islamic fight for conquest.

But I was stymied by yet another puzzle. I’d completed a compilation of every public statement ever made by Osama bin Laden, intending to publish it in book form, then realized that to the average Western reader Osama’s words were gibberish. Bin Laden spoke brilliantly on behalf of his militant beliefs. But he referred over and over again to a historical weave of names, places, and events I could not track down. He referred to places with obscure names, names that in some cases didn’t even appear in any English language encyclopedia—Assam, Fatani and Ogadin.
³²
He referred to “knights of Mohammed the conqueror”
³³
and the causes they fought for using names of ancient heroes and events that weren’t traceable on Google and didn’t show up in Western or modern Moslem histories of the Middle East. He referred to a past that gave a powerful but mysterious foundation to militant Islamic thought. What was this history? Why couldn’t I find it? Why was it not in the books I dug up in Islamic bookstores or in English-language Islamic websites? Why was it not in the Western histories of Islam? Why wasn’t it part of your basic education in history and mine?