Muslims believe that by living your life according to your own un-Islamic values you are victimizing them. You do not have to actually hurt anyone to be an oppressor. For the simple fact that you do not live your life according to Islamic values, you are oppressing the Muslims and suppressing Islam and you are an enemy of God.

In the verse 2:190 Muhammad wrote:  

“And fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but do not transgress. Surely, Allah loves not the transgressors.” 2.190

Muslims quote this verse to show that the Islamic wars were actually defensive. Someone who has no knowledge of the Quran and the sha’ne nozul (The reason for the revelation) may actually believe it. But not so! This verse was “revealed” when Muhammad was about to invade Mecca. Muhammad uncharacteristically was soft with the Meccans and unlike in other cases he did not take booty from them, except a dozen of them (including a woman singer), who composed poems and mocked him, a crime he could not tolerate. He did not massacre the Meccans. The reason for this decision is obvious: Meccans were his own people. They were his own relatives and he knew that blood is thicker than water and their support would be of much greater value to him. So in the above verse he is telling his invading army not to partake in a killing spree as they are used to and if the Meccans surrender and do not fight back the Muslims should not kill them. Of course in several other places the unbelievers surrendered with no fight and he massacred the men anyway, taking the women and children as captives and sex slaves. This was not what Muhammad envisioned for his own people. He was ready to pardon their lives and their belongings, should they surrender and not fight back. Therefore that verse had a very specific scope. Had the Meccans decided to defend their town, he would have killed them all. So when he said, “fight against those who fight against you”, he meant kill those who defend themselves. During the 23 years of his prophetic carrier, Muhammad waged sixty-seven wars. Sixty-six of them were offensive wars. The one known as Khandaq (translation:  ditch) was defensive, but that war was never fought and the enemy withdrew.

In the subsequent verse he writes:  

“And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have Turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter; but fight them not at the Sacred Mosque, unless they (first) fight you there; but if they fight you, slay them. Such is the reward of those who suppress faith.” 2.191 

Here Muhammad is encouraging the emigrants, who were also Meccans, to slay their own relatives wherever they catch them and turn them out from Mecca because, as he puts it, they turned the Muslims out. This is of course false because Muslims went out of Mecca on their own volition and because Muhammad asked them to. He even issued a threat and warned those who did not emigrate of punishment and Hell. 8.72, 8.16 

To arouse his followers to kill, he told them “tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter”. Meaning: since your relatives oppressed you, it is okay to slaughter them because what they did to you was worse than killing. Ponder upon the moral relativism of the messenger of Allah! Is really exile worse than killing? If you are faced with punishment, would you rather be kicked out of your town or would you prefer to be slain?   

It is also important to note what constituted “oppression” for Muhammad. Oppression means opposing Islam. If you criticize Islam you are oppressing Muslims. By that definition I am an oppressor of a billion Muslims. That is why when anyone criticizes Islam his murder becomes mandatory upon all Muslims. He is deemed to be an oppressor by virtue of expressing his opposing views.    

On November 16th, the online newsletter, Malaysia Niki reported: “Malaysia has urged the United States to jail anti-Islamic extremists whom it warned were just as dangerous to global security as any terrorist group. Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said it was insufficient for US President George W. Bush to just verbally rebuke prominent US Christians over their anti-Islamic rhetoric. "A definitive action must be taken against them if we want to avoid a clash of civilizations between Islam and the west," Syed Hamid was quoted as saying by the New Straits Time. 

The Foreign Minister of Malaysia is threatening the USA that unless the critics of Islam are not jailed there would be "clashes of civilizations". And surely the events in Nigeria have given us a clue as to what that entails. This man is a senior politician of a country known to be among the most moderate of all Islamic countries.  

On November 13th, Insight Magazine published Kenneth Timmerman’s interview with Egypt’s Grand Mufti, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, who called Falwell a terrorist, but then said suicide bombers simply are “defending their land”.   

You don’t have to physically harm a Muslim in order to be an oppressor and therefore become eligible to be slain. If you promote your religion in an Islamic country, you are said to be causing tumult and oppressing Islam. Because of this, you must die.   

The Christian health workers in Pakistan did not even preach Christianity. Regardless, their altruistic work was seen as propaganda for Christianity and because of this they were deemed to be oppressors and sadly, as a result, ended up paying with their very lives for this perceived “transgression”. The Christian nuns, missionaries, teachers or health workers -- are all oppressors in the eyes of the Muslims. They are considered sedition makers, who cause tumult and therefore, deserve to die. If you are a writer/journalist and speak against Islam, you are an oppressor. If you preach your own religion in your own country where Muslims also compete for new converts, you are an oppressor. 

A couple of months ago, a Nigerian terrorist organization circulated a petition. One of their emails hit my mailbox. They complained: “Since almost half of them are scholars, the Christians are soon to dominate Nigeria politically and socially.” Further lamenting: “The level of corruption [of Muslim politicians] in Nigeria has not favoured Islamic Youth Movements in any field, instead our opposition are taking the centre stage and calling the shots.”  What they were soliciting was money, to fight this “oppression”.

3