Paying the Jizya to Welfare Terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev

By  Andrew C. McCarthy

The invaluable Raymond Ibrahim had an illuminating column about a month ago. Ray recounts how a Salafi sheikh has explained that U.S. aid to Egypt is considered jizya. That is the tax the Koran requires non-Muslims to pay for the privilege of living in a sharia state. As Allah directs in sura 9:29, it is not enough for conquered infidels (usually referred to by the dehumanizing term, kuffar) merely to pay this tribute; they must do so “with willing submission” in a manner that makes them “feel themselves subdued” — the humiliating condition of dhimmitude. The same reasoning applies to social welfare payments — they, too, are jizya.

 

“Wait a second,” you may say, ”I’m not crazy about foreign aid to countries that hate us and welfare for slackers, but paying it hardly means we’ve been conquered.” Well, as I’ve been trying to stress, to understand what we’re up against, you have to see the world through their eyes. As Ray elaborates, the process of conquering is a gradual humiliation: Islamic supremacists make life as dificult as possible for the sugar daddy kuffar while demanding to be paid for the privilege — and the payment itself is symbolic of the conquest. Ray captures the Salafist’s reasoning:

 

According to the sheikh, Egypt must be less cooperative with the U.S. and at the same time insist for more monetary aid. If so, the sheikh believes that “America will accept; it will kiss our hands; and it will also increase its aid. And we will consider its aid as jizya, not as aid. But first we must make impositions on it.”

When the host asked the sheikh “Do the Americans owe us jizya?” he responded, “Yes,” adding that it is the price Americans have to pay “so we can leave them alone!” When the host asked the sheikh if he was proclaiming a fatwa, the latter exclaimed, “By Allah of course!” The sheikh added that, to become a truly Islamic state, Egypt must “impose on America to pay aid as jizya, before we allow it to realize its own interests, the ones which we agree to.”

Ray then goes on to show that Anjem Choudary, a notorious Islamic supremacist preacher with a wide following in U.K., instructed British Muslims that they should seek welfare payments as the “Jihad Seeker’s Allowance”:

Just last February, for example, Anjem Choudary, an Islamic cleric and popular preacher in the United Kingdom, was secretly taped telling a Muslim audience to follow his example and get “Jihad Seeker’s Allowance” from the government—a pun on “Job Seeker’s Allowance.” The father of four, who receives more than 25,000 pounds annually in welfare benefits, referred to British taxpayers as “slaves,” adding, “We take the jizya, which is our haq [Arabic for "right"], anyway. The normal situation by the way is to take money from the kafir [infidel], isn’t it? So this is the normal situation. They give us the money—you work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar ["Allah is Great"]. We take the money. Hopefully there’s no one from the DSS [Department of Social Security] listening to this.”

In so many ways, Tamerlan Tsarnaev exactly followed the Isalmic supremacist playbook. Yet, as Mark observes, the Official Explanatoin is: anything but Islam. Even when they tell us precisely why they do what they do, we refuse to hear it.