Defenders of the West. Raymond Ibrahim. Another must-read.

The Christian Heroes who stood against Islam.

Thursday, June 29, 2023 by Ferdinand III
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As Western ‘Civilisation’ implodes due to cultural Marxism, relativism, objectivism, and the descent into gender, pharmaceutical, totalitarian, open-borders madness and confusion, few know anything about the heroic wars waged by the Byzantine and Catholic Churches against the cult of Muhammed and its Jihad.  Most in the decayed, immoral, perverted and subverted ‘West’ simply assume that Muhammedanism was ‘always the religion’ of Musulman states.  They have no idea about the rape, slaughter and destruction visited by the cult of Muhammed on Christian civilisation and turning non-Musulman regions into Koran worshippers.  But they can tell you the winner of the latest song contest.

 

‘Defenders’ is a must-read historical account of great men who defended civilisation.  It should be read with ‘Sword and Scimitar’.  Eight key figures are described by Ibrahim: Duke Godfrey, The Cid, King Richard, Saint Ferdinand III, Saint Louis, John Hunyadi, Skanderbeg in Albania, and Vlad Dracul (Lord) or Dracula.  The cited bibliography runs to 8 pages, and there are 15 pages of small print endnote citations.  It is a historical narrative of truth and redolence that would pass a so-called ‘peer review’.  Many others could have been added including Charles Martel, Don Juan, Jan Sobieski, Leo III, and countless more.  The magnificent 8 could be expanded to the formidable 80 in no time.

 

The importance of these men cannot be under-estimated.  Ibrahim quotes US President Teddy Roosevelt who nicely summarises the reality:

“Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought.  If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on to and including the seventeenth century had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan…wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared.”

 

Roosevelt was correct.  In the anti-Christian ‘West’ the Catholic and Christian religion is held in low esteem after 150 years of endless materialist and atheist propaganda, none of it scientific and most of it fictitious.  In many urban areas in Europe, local leaders applaud and demand the Muslimification of their cities, against the wishes of the majority.  No debates, no referenda are held on the issue of unlimited Musulman immigration.  The elite would care less about culture, history and reality.  They have agendas to carry out.

 

This forms Ibrahim’s conclusion. The eight men he studies were venerated long after their deaths as heroes, some as Saints.  No longer.  Today they are white Muhammedophobes, racists, masculine white-supremacists, deluded-fanatical-Christians, war-criminals, barely literate idiots who never took a bath.  The Musulmans are portrayed as peaceful, content, the victims assaulted by nasty Christians, with the entire 1400-year period of savage Mahometan Jihad never happening.  Such is the stupidity of the modern ‘West’.

“At any rate, being enemies of Islam is just the tip of the iceberg as to why the men profiled in the preceding pages are now so abhorred.  They are, after all, guilty of far greater ‘sins’: every one of them was the living embodiment of what is today condemned as ‘toxic masculinity’ and the ‘patriarchy’.  Worse, not only were they all white, male, and Christian, but – far from being ashamed or apologetic over these now ‘troubling’ attributes – two of these identity markers, their masculinity and religious faith, are precisely what animated them to act.”

 

In the ‘West’ today where are the men and where is the real faith?

As Ibrahim laments, because these men opposed the much-loved (within quackademia and the fake news and fake education), cult of Muhammad, modern ‘history’ portrays them as sinful criminals and endeavours to rewrite or ignore the historical record.  Thus, we have El Cid as an uncaring mercenary (he was a devout Christian opposed to the Muslim cult); Saint Louis IX as a racist Islamophobe, King Richard the Lionheart as a gay psychotic, or Skanderbeg as an Albanian patriot who cared not for Christianity (he was a former prisoner of the Sultan and led a Christian initiated revolt in Albania against the Ottomans for 30 years). 

 

In general, the quacks and rewriters portray any Christian pushback against 1400 years of Musulman Jihad as an act of aggression and ‘colonialisation’, or they try to denigrate it to a local, regional or national ‘revolt’ against their superiors (in their eyes), the Musulmans.  Modern ‘history’ is yet another example of too many ‘universities’, too many programs, too many useless degrees and too many useless people with too much time on their hands writing useless ‘far left’ Musulman apologia.  The irony is that most of these absurdities would not have their easy life to write fiction, if the 8 men analysed by Ibrahim had not existed.  This is why reading Ibrahim’s books is so refreshing.  Back to reality.

 

https://www.raymondibrahim.com/books/

 

 

Christianophobia and Genocide. The most persecuted religion and group, in the World

The Post Christian West could care less. Imagine if Christians were slaughtering Musulmans....

Friday, June 23, 2023 by Ferdinand III
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Christians are being murdered, raped, sex enslaved, attacked, beaten, condemned, imprisoned, fired, and subject to a persecution not seen since the days of Diocletian in the late 3^rd and early 4^th centuries.  The useless, mendacious, capricious, criminal ‘West’ does not care.  So many other things to worry about:  the plant food, the climate thingy, the Uke proxy war against the Slavs, Trans-‘rights’, dancing, singing and sports on TV, the next Scamdemic, the ‘anti-vaxxers’, the return of Drumpf, black and non-white ‘rights’ and reparations.  No interest in the slaughter of the Christian innocents, the vast majority of them black and brown-skinned.

Christians and their religion being assaulted, violated, effaced, debauched, everywhere.

The Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) noted in its annual report Thursday that Christian persecution has been “sharply on the rise” and “its terrible impacts have only begun to be felt.”

“The merciless targeting of Christians — driven by hatred of Christians and the faith itself — emerges as a common denominator in hundreds of testimonies of persecution,” ACN declares in the report.

Today, “almost 340 million Christians around the world — or 1 out of every 7 — live in a country where they suffer some form of persecution, such as arbitrary arrest, violence, a full range of human rights violations and even murder,” the report states.

In its global efforts, ACN “is committed to chronicling and assessing the evolving phenomenon of the persecution of Christians around the world today,” it declares.

 

Uganda is an example of the bloodbath of Christian dead

The young Christians at the Mpondwe Lhubiriha Secondary School in Kasese District, western Uganda, were ending their day in their usual way: singing hymns of praise. But the sounds of praise turned swiftly to screams of horror, as Islamists from the jihadi group Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) broke into the school building and set upon the pupils with guns and machetes. Many were shot or hacked to death. Others were burned alive as the jihadists threw petrol bombs into dormitories. 

 

One of the school dormitories where many young Christians were burned to death by Islamists. Officials from the Ugandan Ministry of Education survey the scene of the slaughter [Image credit: Janet K Museveni]

 

At least 41 people were slaughtered, the majority of them schoolchildren, boys and girls in their mid-teens. The school comprises just over 60 pupils, most of whom live there. Eight other people were critically injured, while six others were abducted and forced to help carry food the Islamists looted from the school as they made their escape into the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

As they departed the terrorists were heard shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is the greatest”) – a traditional Islamic declaration of faith.

 

Musulmans screaming their war cry to their celestial ‘god’ and quoting from the Koran as they slaughter, rape and kill Christians, a 1400 year pandemic of Jihad.  So where are the Musulmans in the streets of the effeminate, perverted ‘West’ demanding that their co-religionists stop the slaughter and murders?  Never to be seen is the answer.  More likely secret and private satisfaction at the end of the Trinity-worshippers.

 

A must read book, Raymond Ibrahim’s ‘Sword and Scimitar’.

The Musulman Jihad - timeless, perpetual, pagan and primitive.

Wednesday, June 21, 2023 by Ferdinand III
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One of the best books on the endless Jihad and the Musulman imperative, based on the Koran, to wipe out Christianity.

 

If you want to understand the external danger posed by the cult of Muhammad to what is left of ‘Western Civilisation’ read the Sword and Scimitar.  Ibrahim is Egyptian, not a Musulman, not a Christian (not a practicing Catholic certainly) but is assuredly an expert on the history of Muhammad’s cult, having written for years on the topic.  His works are always superbly researched and extensively reviewed and audited by others in the same field.  His website is https://www.raymondibrahim.com/ and is full of historical gems and commentary and is a necessary bookmark.

 

The book covers the Musulman eruption into Christian Byzantine Syria in 636 and covers the torrid history of Jihad, plunder, white enslavement, rape and destruction until 1683.  It is a tour de force and education. 

 

The Musulman Jihad against Western Christendom, the rump as Ibrahim rightly states of a far larger Christian culture which stretched from the sands of Arabia, across the Near East, North Africa and to the North Sea, is a story rarely told.  ‘Western Civilisation’ largely defamed and neutered by 19^th century quackery and ‘Enlightenment’ religiosity, is debauched and criticised as ‘dark’, ‘superstitious’, ‘unscientific’, and ‘primitive’. 

 

A proper reading of our history reveals the opposite, and the world in which such calumnies are issued, a world for Westerners of technology, transport and plenty, is a world which would not exist but for the Byzantine and Catholic Churches and their complex, cultural, visceral, masculine, desperate and courageous defence of Greek-Roman and Christian civilisation.  It is quite as simple as that, and Ibrahim provides maybe the best one volume outline of just how vicious the Musulman assault was on Christianity and how deep-seated is its hatred of the ‘Trinity-worshippers’.  There is plenty of compulsion in Muhammad’s cult and ample rivers of hate and bile toward Christianity.  This is why most sentient people feel that the Mahometan demographics in Europe will presage its collapse as the celestial-Muhammad cult’s population doubles between 2030 and 2050 to comprise some 40% of the population in northern England, the urban areas of Holland, France, Italy and Spain.  What the Jihad couldn’t do by war, it will do with demography.

 

Ibrahim’s book analyses eight key battles, four of which were won by the Musulmans at Yarmuk in Syria (636), Manzikert (1071 in Anatolia), Hattin (1187 near Jerusalem), Constantinople (1453) and four by Christians, the 717 Siege of Constantinople (Byzantine Christendom), Tours (732 by the Catholic Charles Martel), Las Navas de Tolosa (1212 by the Catholic Alfonso) and the second Siege of Vienna (1683, won by the Catholic Sobieski).  I would add that Don Pelayo’s victory at Covadonga in 722 was perhaps the most essential Christian victory in the West, setting the stage for Martel’s victory at Tours 10 years later, an even now reduced by ‘historian’s to a mere Musulman ‘raid’ comprised of a ‘small’ force of some 80.000 Jihadis.

 

Ibrahim is right in this assessment:  if one of the European victories in the battles listed above had gone to the Musulman Jihad, it is quite likely Europe would have been colonised and Koranised by Muhammad’s cult.

 

The Koran plainly states that Christianity must be erased.  Period.  It is in almost every long ‘Sura’ or chapter in the Musulman handbook called recital.  There exists some 1500 and more verses of Christianophobia and non-Muslim intolerance in this supposed ‘holy book’.  The message could not be clearer – the world must be ruled by Mahometans who impose Sharia or 7^th century Muhammadan codes on all populations. 

 

For Muslims, the current Jihad against Christians is as old as the cult itself and can take on various forms – war, emigration, demography, deceit, terrorism – whatever will work to bring the Infidel under the yoke of Mahometan control.  

 

As the book relates in great refreshing detail, few in the ‘West’ realize that the Mahometan world consists largely of land taken by force from Christian populations, which were then coercively Islamized over the course of centuries. Conquest and coercion are integral to Islam.  The horror and scale of Muslim atrocities against Western populations, in this process of war, Jihad and Christian genocide are staggering.  Millions – my estimate is 25 millions over 1400 years – were either enslaved, killed, or forced to be eunuchs.  The massive enslavement, wanton destruction, desecration of all things Christian, the wild crucifixions, impalement on stakes, skinning alive, and of course endless rape and sexual predation.  This is the world our ancestors lived in for over a millennium.

 

Musulmans and their cult have not changed.  But the weak, effeminate (what is a woman?), lethargic, apathetic, ignorant, fat, supine West has changed – for the worse.  Muslims still venerate their heritage and religion—which commands jihad against infidels—whereas the West has learned to despise its heritage and religion, causing it to become an unwitting ally of the jihad.  The cult of Submission or Islam is terrorizing the West today, not only because it can, but because the West allows it to happen.  There are as well many elements within Western states who actively support Musulmans and their claims either to special victim status, or to welfare and jizya (a tax on Infidels) in the form of welfare and state largesse.  This will not end well for what is left of ‘Western Civilisation’.  For no matter how diminished, a still swinging Scimitar will always overcome a non-existent Sword.

 

Jihad and the Koran or Recital. A Musulman obligation.

An essential element in Muhammad's Mein Kampf.

Tuesday, June 13, 2023 by Ferdinand III
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War, or ‘lesser Jihad’ is the 2^nd most important ‘pillar’ in the Mahometan cult.  This is ignored in the ‘school system’, universities of ‘higher education’ and in the fake news, faker commentary world.  A simple example is to read Sura 9 which expostulates the extermination of non-Muslims. It is the ‘last’ and thus, ‘most important’ chapter in Muhammad’s handbook of war.  Sura 9 helpfully lays out the plan in very clear language.  Kill the Infidel Christian, or at the very least, subdue and enslave them.

Qur’an 9:5 “When the sacred forbidden months for fighting are past, fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, torture them, and lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.”

Qur’an 9.29 Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.

What does the Quran, or Koran actually teach?

Muhammad’s handbook of war is not organised.  It runs from the longest Sura or chapter to the shortest.  Many earlier verses found in the compendium can be superseded by later commands.  Muslims call this ‘abrogation’.  Some chapters like Sura 9, take precedence over earlier or even later chapters, given their primacy.  Usually Suras, 9, 5, 2, 4, 7 and 8 are considered the most important chapters and their actual order will differ based on the Musulman viewpoint. 

We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except that We bring forth [one] better than it or similar to it. Do you not know that Allah is over all things competent? (2:106)

And when We substitute a verse in place of a verse – and Allah is most knowing of what He sends down – they say, “You, [O Muhammad], are but an inventor [of lies].” But most of them do not know. (16:101)

Abrogation allows Muslims to clarify contradictions.  Sura 9:5 quote above is called the verse of the sword – the last and greatest ‘revelation’ to Muhammad.  It will abrogate any verses which may indicate peace or tolerance.  In actual fact, apart from sentence fragments taken out of context from preceding and succeeding verses, there is in actuality no tolerance for Christians expressed in the Koran.  None.  One needs to read past the sentence fragments used by Muslim apologists and see the entirety of what is being expressed.  An example is 2:256 and the ‘no compulsion’ nonsense and sentence fragment.  If anyone bothers to read the entirety of that page you will see there is plenty of compulsion in Sura 2 – and violence, war and hate.  If one has the energy, you can read the next verse, if that is not too much work, and see quite clearly that the disbelieving Christian will be sent to Hell.  Lots of compulsion here.

2:257: Allah is the Wali (Protector or Guardian) of those who believe. He brings them out from darkness into light. But as for those who disbelieve, their Auliya (supporters and helpers) are Taghut [false deities and false leaders, etc.], they bring them out from light into darkness. Those are the dwellers of the Fire, and they will abide therein forever.

Jihad is mandatory as given by abrogation and Sura 9.  In fact, Surah 9 is probably the most violent chapter as the following verses demonstrate as given above in 9:29.  If Christians don’t submit to Musulman rule as dhimmis or 2^nd class tax paying slaves, then they should be destroyed.

O Prophet, fight against the disbelievers and the hypocrites and be harsh upon them. And their refuge is Hell, and wretched is the destination. (9:73)

Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth, through the Law, the Gospel, and the Qur’an: and who is more faithful to his covenant than Allah? (9:111)

O ye who believe! Fight the unbelievers who gird you about, and let them find firmness in you: and know that Allah is with those who fear Him. (9:123)

By my reckoning there are well over 1500 verses of violence, hate, antipathy and intolerance directed against Christians in the Koran.  Every page has a declaration of animosity and bile towards Christians.  This is called Christophobia or Christianophobia.

  

Muslim ‘Jurisprudence’ agrees

All four principle Sunni schools of Islamic law agree on the importance of jihad as warfare, as do Shi’ites.  There is a long history of this teaching because it is very clear in the Qur’an.  Mahometan scholar, Mufti Taqi Usmani was a sharia judge in the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan.  He has served on the sharia advisory boards of several financial institutions, including HSBC. In his book Islam and Modernism, he responds to a question about whether jihad should still be waged in a country in which Islam can freely be preached. He responds by citing Q 9:29 (above) and commenting:

Here killing should continue until the unbelievers pay the Jizya after they are humbled or overpowered. If the purpose of killing was only to acquire permission and freedom of preaching Islam, it would have been said “until they allow for preaching Islam”

So this Muslim, oft-quoted as a ‘moderate’ advocates killing Christians and non-Muslims today, a fact found in his country of Pakistan which persecutes, imprisons and kills Christians. 

The cult of Muhammad was only spread by war and emigration.  The demographic tide of Musulmans within Western societies will lead to civil war, or a civil implosion as the foundation of Christianity is effaced and the roots of civilisation deracinated.  A Twentieth century Orientalist and historian Henri Lammens, summarised it pretty succinctly:

The Jehad. The war against the non-Muslims, so frequently recommended in the Medinese suras, almost became, as with the Kharijites, a “sixth pillar of Islam”. Islam owes to it her expansion, in which “the mission”, properly speaking, has played an insignificant role.

Jihad and war is probably the 2^nd most important pillar on Muhammad’s cult, after the worship of himself and Al-Lah.

==

Andrew Bostom ed, The Legacy of Jihad (New York: Prometheus, 2008), 27-28.

Usmani, Islam and Modernism 2006, 131.

Henri Lammens, Islam Beliefs and Institutions, 62.

 

 

The real meaning of Jihad is war. War against the Infidel. War to submit the world to Muhammad.

The Mahometan cult was built and expanded with War.

Friday, June 9, 2023 by Ferdinand III
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Islam means submission, and it demands the submission of all to the Al Lah and his only prophet, Muhammad of Mecca.  Mark Durie, a linguistics and theology scholar, writes: “In its original meaning, a Muslim was someone who surrendered in warfare.”^[1] Muhammad’s famous phrase aslim taslam means “surrender (i.e. submit to Islam) and you will be safe”.^[2]  These words were included by him in letters sent to various rulers offering them peace if they surrendered to Islam. The cult of Muhammad means surrender, submission and to be subjugated by his Jihadis.

Muhammad’s equivalent of Mao’s Little Red Book, or Hitler’s Mein Kampf, is the Koran or Recital, meaning to memorise and follow.  In Recital Jihad has 2 parts, one is reflection, and the other is to wage war (or lesser Jihad).  Waging War to subdue the world for Muhammad is the 2^nd pillar of the cult of Submission.  It is the most important demand after proclaiming your devotion to follow the Al Lah and his only prophet Muhammad, captured in the daily shahada recitation, wrongly called a ‘prayer’ by the ignorant, given that it is a supremacist declaration and consigns Christians and Jews to enemy status. Nothing in the primary books, or in its history, indicates that Submission is ‘peaceful’.  The opposite presents itself.  It is fierce, warlike, bloody, vengeful, intolerant and totalitarian.  Submission is war not peace.

The Westerners who promote the Islam-is-peace lie, live in countries that are not yet under Sharia barbarism (it is not a ‘law’) and we don’t see them moving to a Muslim state anytime soon.  How cheap it is to promote a mendacity when the proponent has never lived in the Muhammadan world of Sharia.  How ignorant it is to promote the twisted when the trumpeter is ignorant of history and reality of Jihad and the quite endless Muslim war on the West which started in 636 AD and involved all states in Europe, both East and West.  Even the Nordics had troops fighting the Arab and Muslim invasions, aiding the Christian Byzantine empire which suffered from 817 years of ceaseless Muslim warring and aggression.  But how many know a thing about Byzantium or the Varaganian guards?

The myth that the earnest, pious, bearded, direct Musulman represented peace and love emanates from the 1930s, when Mahometans in the West marketed their cult and tried to attract followers.^[3]

Such a marketing message was false, contravening 1300 years of Jihadic hate, supremacism and war.  In the 18^th and 19^th centuries it was largely agreed upon by historians and those who understood the vicious assault by Musulmans on the rump of Christendom named the ‘West’, which was about 1/3 of the total area under Christianity at the time of Musulman irruption in 636-636 A.D., that the Mahometans created very little as they extirpated far older, sophisticated, and far richer empires. 

The entire Mediterranean and Near East stretching through to India and into China was thrown into confusion, chaos and turned upside down by the Mahometans.  Ancient civilisations around the Mediterranean were in 636 A.D. a blend of the pagan Roman, Greek, Goth and Christian.  They were educated, technologically advanced, dynamic, wealthy, merchant states, many deeply pious even to the point of arguing over the exact nature of Christ’s body, spirit and soul.  Emperors became embroiled in heated discussions on the Trinity.  Angels never danced on the heads of pins, but there was deep theological and rational debate on what Church creeds and dogma actually meant.  There is nothing wrong with that.

Now the largely atheist-agnostic West, which can’t define a woman, terrified of a rounding error trace chemical called plant food which apparently causes the weather, and which believed the Corona fascism was a health imperative, imbibes the dogma, ‘the science’ in modern parlance, to affirm that the Mahometans were simply peace loving goat herders, building enormously advanced societies, whilst the dirty, hairy, stupid Christians in their mud huts, cowered, toothless, shoeless, unable to fathom bathing or maths, suffering through a dark age, worse than those who live at the margins of the last Ice Age.  In this theme we have modern bile and bigotry replacing reality. 

The Meaning of Jihad

The Arabic word ‘jihad’ means ‘struggle’ or ‘strive’. It is sometimes ambiguous whether this refers to a spiritual or a physical (violent) struggle. The clearest use in a non-violent sense is Q 22:78: And strive (jahidoo) for Allah with the striving (jihadihi) due to him. He has chosen you and has not placed upon you in the religion any difficulty.

 

However, there are plenty of clear references to jihad as violent struggle. For example, Q 2:216-218: Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you… Indeed, those who have believed and those who have emigrated and fought (jihad) in the cause of Allah – those expect the mercy of Allah. And Allah is Forgiving and Merciful. The claim is sometimes made that there is a distinction between the ‘greater jihad’ and the ‘lesser jihad’. This claim is based on the following hadith:

 

Some troops came back from an expedition and went to see the Messenger of Allah sallallahu `alayhi wa-Sallam. He said: “You have come for the best, from the smaller jihad (al-jihad al-asghar) to the greater jihad (al-jihad al-akbar).” Someone said, “What is the greater jihad?” He said: “The servant’s struggle against his lust” (mujahadat al-`abdi hawah).

 

This hadith is narrated in Al-Bayhaqi in al-Zuhd al-Kabir, though it is noted that “This is a chain that contains weakness.”^[4] It is dated from the first half of the ninth century and is not related in any of the official canonical hadith collections.^[5] Most significantly, it is contradicted by the Qur’an itself which says:

 

Not equal are those believers who sit (at home) and receive no hurt, and those who strive and fight in the cause of Allah with their goods and their persons. Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit (at home). Unto all (in Faith) hath Allah promised good: But those who strive and fight hath He distinguished above those who sit (at home) by a special reward. (Q 4:95)

Here it is clear that physical fighting is regarded as the greater endeavour. All four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, as well as the Shi’ite tradition make no reference to a ‘greater jihad’. There are multiple references to jihad in the most trusted hadith collections and with virtually no exceptions, they all refer to physical fighting.

For example:

A man came to Allah’s Messenger and said, “Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward).” He replied, “I do not find such a deed.” Then he added, “Can you, while the Muslim fighter is in the battle-field, enter your mosque to perform prayers without cease and fast and never break your fast?” The man said, “But who can do that?” Abu-Huraira added, “The Mujahid (i.e. Muslim fighter) is rewarded even for the footsteps of his horse while it wanders about (for grazing) tied in a long rope”. (Bukhari 5:52:44)

Leading scholar David Cook argues that attempts to present jihad in purely spiritual terms are completely unsupported by the evidence, and only occur in writings for Western audiences: “Those who write in Arabic or other Muslim majority languages realise that it is pointless to present jihad as anything other than militant warfare.”^[6]

In fact, jihad as physical fighting for the spread of Islam is so prominent in the traditional teaching of Islam that it is sometimes referred to as the sixth pillar of Islam. In the earliest hadith collections, sections on jihad immediately follow those on the five pillars.^[7]