The mainstream or lamebrain media always conflates Islam with Christianity. In times past the media and the clever-people in the West also panegyrized German National Socialist welfare conflating the destruction of the individual and the elevation of unfettered state power with morality. After all the Germans had a system of unlimited social welfare, free education, free health, dental and daycare, guaranteed jobs.....sounds like a modern Swedish nirvana or Barack Obama's dream does it not? These same smart people theorized that Russian National Socialist 'guarantees' were also wonderful examples of a brave new world in which the individual would be subsumed into a glorious communal cult, full of group morality, strength and meaning. After all the Russians had 'charities', free baby clothes, socialized education, managed 'free' speech....and were so much better off than the suffering 'poor' and dispossessed in the unfair, and unequal Western world.
So now the lamebrains are at it again. Muslim charity is somehow correlated with the Christian version and now Muslim 'Zakat' or the obligation to give to the Muslim poor, is erroneously 'assumed' to be the exact same as the Western ideal of self-less giving. The opposite is true. Muslim zakat is simply the sustenance of Muslims and their community or Umma. No charity – none – is ever given to non-Muslims, especially Jews, Christians, Hindus or Buddhists. There is no record of a Muslim charity anywhere in the Western or Muslim world, which has given any significant amount of succour or aid to a non-Muslim cause or to help out with a natural disaster. Can you imagine a Muslim organization helping out poor Jews in Israel or non-Muslim poor in an American inter-city? It will never happen. Western welfare states transfer hundreds of millions of dollars to their Muslim residents who partake in the rich social welfare state. The Jews spend millions of dollars a day donating free food, hospital, and medical care to the Arabs in Gaza. Yet the media and the Arabs pillory the Jew as a parasitical blood sucking agent, who only extracts money. Funny how the flow of Jew money into the Arab world is disregarded.
Andrew McCarthy states the obvious about Zakat – and its real purpose.
Muslims are taught that charity means Muslims aiding Muslims, for the purpose of fortifying and extending the ummah until all the world is Islam’s domain. “Of their wealth, take alms,” instructs Allah in the Koran (9:103), “that so thou mightest purify and sanctify them.” Thus, zakat may be given only to Muslims.
Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law (Umdat al-Salik) was compiled by the renowned Muslim jurisprudent Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri in the 14th century. It is the most authoritative source on the subject of sharia (Islamic law), having been certified by al-Azhar University in Cairo — the font of Sunni learning — as conforming “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.” .....Reliance is quite blunt on the matter: “It is not permissible to give zakat to a non-Muslim.”
....More recently, Shaykh Faraz Rabbani at Sunni Path, the “Islamic Academy” that has become popular among Muslim web-surfers, observed that in all major schools of Islamic jurisprudence “there is consensus . . . that a non-Muslim (dhimmi) cannot be given any zakat.” ...
In fact an essential purpose of zakat is to underwrite jihad. Americans see it as a dangerous fraud when Islamic charities are used as fronts for terrorist organizations. In mainstream Islam, however, there is no fraud at all — not if your understanding of “charity” is zakat.
“It is obligatory,” according to Reliance of the Traveller, “to distribute one’s zakat among eight categories of recipients, one-eighth of the zakat to each category.” The manual goes on to describe these categories, the seventh of which is “those fighting for Allah, meaning people engaged in Islamic military operations for whom no salary has been allotted in the army roster.”
Al-Misri, the 14th-century scholar, did not dream that one up — and there was no al-Qaeda around to “hijack” Islam from him. He pulled it right out of the Koran. Sura 9:60, the verse most often associated with zakat, directs that “alms are for the poor and the needy, and those employed to administer the funds; for those whose hearts have recently reconciled to Truth [i.e., to Islam]; for those in bondage [like those imprisoned terrorists] and in debt; in the cause of Allah; and for the wayfarer. Thus is it ordained by Allah.”
The Koran makes it clear that Infidels will burn in hell. Logically Muslims would not send to the hated Infidel pig and ape charity now would they? If the Infidel is cursed by the Allah-thing, than why should Muslims help out non-Muslims? This would be an irrational tautology. But not for the clever people who run the Western universities, media and political systems. Most of the Muslimophiles have never read the Koran, nor Islamic history. They simply equate Islam with Christianity. This is about as intelligent as correlating German or Russian Nazism with Western civilisation. Zakat is for Muslims only, to support the Umma, so it can prosper and spread to conquer the world. That is all it is intended for.