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Background:
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The current attacks:
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The problem:
The solution:
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Islamic Fascism
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Islamic Fascism
is really a modern phenomenon.
[1]
It is basically a 20th century totalitarian movement -
like fascism and communism.
Islam
existed before Islamic Fascism,
and will exist after it.
Islamic Fascism
is designed - like fascism and communism -
to appeal to idealistic young people
with a utopian future
where the world will be "cleansed".
It really started with
the Iranian revolution
in 1979,
and used to be called
"Islamic fundamentalism".
Other names for it
are
"Islamofascism" or
"Islamism".
I think "Islamic Fascism" is the clearest,
most descriptive name, [2]
showing that
this is simply
the same kind of thing that the democracies
spent the 20th century fighting.
Islamic Fascism is genuinely fascist.
It has contempt
for democracy, free speech and human rights.
It is full of hatred for
Jews, atheists, homosexuals, and
liberated women.
It is linked to
racist hatred of blacks in Sudan,
slave trading of black Africans,
and racist hatred of other ethnic minorities
in the Islamic world.
And, like fascism and communism,
the only solution is the total and utter
destruction of this philosophy.
This will take a long Cold War,
lasting for perhaps the next two or three decades,
punctuated by
perhaps one or two more Hot Wars.
But Islamic Fascism
will lose.
Democracy will win.
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- [1] I don't mean to imply that Islam in general
respects human rights or human freedom.
That is clearly not true.
I am only saying that the Islamist movement
we are up against -
idealistic, utopian (full of young people),
expansionist (let's attack the west),
suicide-bombing,
fantasy-based (let's conquer the whole world) -
is quite a new movement,
which did not really exist before the 1960s-70s.
- [2] The terms "Islamic Fascism" or "Islamofascism" are quite respectable:
-
President George W. Bush has used these terms:
- Muslim / Middle Eastern dissidents have used these terms:
- Are these people "racists"
too?
Not at all. They are simply describing what they see.
Just as if starry-eyed young Christian fundamentalists
were suicide-bombing gay bars, strip clubs, mosques, synagogues and
abortion clinics,
urged on by hate-filled TV-evangelist preachers
who promised that the bombers would go to Heaven,
we would not hesitate to describe it as "Christian Fascism".
-
Defending "Islamofascism" - It's a valid term. Here's why, Christopher Hitchens, Oct 22, 2007.
-
"Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ... Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia ... Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression ... Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.
...
Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the "pure" and the "exclusive" over the unclean and the kufar or profane.
...
In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like
the grand mufti of Jerusalem
gravitated to Hitler's side).
...
And, of course, Bin Laden has threatened force against U.N. peacekeepers who might dare interrupt the race-murder campaign against African Muslims that is being carried out by his pious Sudanese friends in Darfur."
-
I love the way he sums it up. It's very simple:
"we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements"
-
Islamic Fascism 101:
On all they've done to earn the name,
by Victor Davis Hanson
- "Make no apologies for the use of "Islamic fascism."
It is the perfect nomenclature for the agenda of radical Islam, for a variety of historical and scholarly reasons.
That such usage also causes extreme embarrassment to both the Islamists themselves
and their leftist "anti-fascist" appeasers in the West is just too bad."
- On the defeat of the jihad:
"it is a vain enterprise to worry over how many Muslims follow or support al Qaeda, or, in contrast, how many in the Middle East actively resist Islamists.
Most people have no ideology, but simply accommodate themselves to the prevailing sense of an agenda's success or failure. Just as there weren't more than a dozen vocal critics of Hitler after the Wehrmacht finished off France in six weeks in June of 1940, so too there wasn't a Nazi to be found in June 1945 when Berlin lay in rubble."
Introduction
Nobody should support a war on
Islam,
but
everybody should support a war on
Islamism.
Islamism is not simply a religious philosophy that one is free not to follow.
Islamism is a political movement that aims to impose itself by force
on those who disagree.
Islamism aims to impose
religious Sharia Law on the whole world,
ending human rights and civil liberties,
ending freedom of religion,
ending freedom of speech,
and
ending freedom of sexuality.
Islamism threatens us and everything we love,
and will always threaten us, until it is defeated.
A War on Islamism is something that every
Christian, Jew, atheist, Hindu or other infidel
should support.
A War on Islamism is something that every
freedom-loving Muslim
should support.
Islamism - or any other philosophy that imposes religion by force - should have no place in our world.
A War on Islamism is a no-brainer, like a War on Fascism.
Every liberal and every leftist should support a War on Islamism.
- The British novelist
Ian McEwan
caused a storm in 2008 by saying:
"I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on".
- Incredibly,
many people were outraged by this.
But every single person in the West should agree with this.
Every Muslim in the West should agree with this.
The two faces of Islamism.
Left,
the destruction of our prosperity, our science, our learning, our culture,
our beautiful cities - everything we have worked for for a thousand years.
Right,
the institution of a reign of primitive superstitious savagery.
Objection: "Islamism" is the real Islam
Many counter-jihad people object to words like "Islamism".
They say:
"Islamism is the
real, theologically-sound Islam.
Tolerant Islam does not follow the example of the Prophet."
- I do not disagree with the arguments by
Robert Spencer
and others that the Islamists who want sharia
(and even the violent utopian Islamists who want to attack the infidel West)
may be a lot closer to the Prophet's life
than tolerant Muslims who want to live in peace.
-
But religions don't have to make sense anyway
(they are hardly based on logic and reason),
and Muslims can invent their own tolerant, peaceful Islam,
no matter what its founder said.
(After all, Jews don't follow the appalling example of Moses' life.)
- We need a name for tolerant Islam, because it does exist,
and in the West at least it is the majority.
I suggest calling it "Islam",
and saving "Islamism" for those who want to impose sharia.
-
Andy McCarthy, 13 Mar 2010, is conflicted about naming:
-
"Islamists are Muslims who would like to see sharia .. installed. ... It is the purpose of jihad. The terrorists are willing to force sharia's installation by violent jihad; other Islamists have varying views about the usefulness of violence, but they also want sharia, and their jihadist methods include tactics other than violence. I reluctantly use the term "Islamist" rather than "Islam" because I believe
there are hundreds of millions of Muslims (somewhere between a third to a half of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims) who do not want to live under sharia, and who want religion to be a private matter, separated from public life. It is baffling to me why these people are Muslims since, as I understand Islam, (a) sharia is a basic element, and (b) Islam rejects the separation of mosque and state. But I'm not a Muslim, so that is not for me to say. I think we have to encourage the non-sharia Muslims and give them space to try to reform their religion, so I believe it's worth labeling the sharia seekers "Islamists" in order to sort them out. But I admit being very conflicted about it because I also concede that the Islamists have the more coherent (and scary) construction of Islam."
-
Jihad Watch, 4 Sept 2011, links to me on this issue, and I reply.
And more.
-
Rusty Shackleford, 13 Sept 2011, points out that the many Muslims around the world who reject jihad and sharia are pioneers of a new type of Islam.
This new type of Islam is probably the majority among Muslims in the West.
-
"A lot of Muslims reject traditional notions of violence and oppression that have been part of mainstream Sunni and Shia Islam for as far back as historical records have been kept.
A majority of Muslims in the US reject these traditions. They are innovators. Many of them left their countries of origin because of they hated these very traditions. I'd love to see more Muslims like them."
-
He is arguing against:
(1) the left, who say traditional Islam is like this,
when that is obviously not true,
and:
(2) the right, who say this is not "real" Islam,
and violent Islam is the "real" Islam -
which is a good point,
but seems not to recognise the complexity of religious belief.
Multiple Islams exist.
It is clear that peaceful, tolerant Islam is not following the example of the Prophet, but so what?
-
Non-Muslim Muslims and the Jihad Against the West, Bosch Fawstin (ex-Muslim atheist), 2 Dec 2011,
argues against any distinction between Islam and Islamism:
- "Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don't aren't."
- "Muslims who aren't very Muslim .. lead some among us to conclude that they must be practicing a more enlightened form of Islam. They're not. They're "practicing" life in non-Muslim countries, where they are free to live as they choose. But their "Islam" is not the Islam.
...
There is nothing in Islam that stays the hand of Muslims who want to kill non-Muslims. If an individual Muslim is personally peaceful, it's not because of Islam, it's because of his individual choice, which is why I often say that your average Muslim is morally superior to Mohammad, to their own religion. The very rare Muslim who helps us against Jihad is acting against his religion, but that doesn't stop some among us from thinking that his existence somehow means that he represents more than himself. ...
when you see well-assimilated Muslims in the West, you're not seeing Islam in action, you're seeing individuals living up to the old adage, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. They're essentially post-Islamic Muslims who have rejected Islamic values and have embraced Western ones."
- Again, I would reply: Who is to say?
What if 90 percent of those who call themselves "Muslim" behave like this,
and 10 percent behave like the violent Prophet?
Why should the 10 percent get to call themselves the "real" Islam?
Why should atheists agree that the 90 percent are apostates?
- Again, I think the logical fallacy is the idea that religions have to make sense.
- Debate,
Robert Spencer and Andy McCarthy, Dec 2011.
-
Andy McCarthy defends the word "Islamism".
On moderate Muslims:
"Am I confident that .. those people will actually succeed, that they can actually reform their religion? No, not particularly. But I think we have to give them a chance. I'm not completely convinced they can't do it, either. But I just don't see what the sense is of taking your natural allies ... and tell them that the problem is their religion .. and that .. basically address them in a way that tells them that we think that their choice is basically to convert. ...
And I say that, I hope, with my eyes open. I appreciate the fact that a lot of the people who use the term "Islamist" use it in a fraudulent way, to suggest that, you know, the Islamists are ... just a handful of terrorists; and everybody else is a moderate Muslim. And I think if that's going to be their interpretation of it, it is a useless term, and we should reject it."
-
Why We Need Words Like 'Islamist', by Raymond Ibrahim, February 13, 2012, argues for some word like "Islamism" to make distinctions.
He points out that a headline like
"Islamists secure 75 percent of Egyptian parliament"
is informative,
whereas saying
"Muslims secure 75 percent of Egyptian parliament"
tells you nothing.
- Robert Spencer replies, 15 Feb 2012,
and despite himself, effectively agrees.
It's just that he prefers a different term to "Islamist"!
"I generally use "Islamic supremacist" instead for the adherents of Sharia and political Islam."
Spencer thinks "Islamist" has all sorts of baggage and extra meanings.
I don't think it has those meanings.
- Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer debate:
-
Islam vs. Islamism, by Daniel Pipes, The Washington Times, May 13, 2013.
- Robert Spencer reply, 15 May 2013.
He does make the good point that:
""Islamism" as a modern construct was by no means the first to transform the "Islamic faith into a political ideology." Islam was political from the beginning; Islamic tradition portrays Muhammad as a political as well as religious leader, and his successors amassed large Islamic empires based on the proposition that Islam was a political system.
...
throughout its history, and in all its theological, legal, and sectarian manifestations, Islam has always been supremacist and political."
The World Trade Centre attack
is the greatest attack
on civilization and liberty
since 1945.
The West is not simply "another" culture.
It is a set of values
that represent the
highest achievement of humanity.
A set of values that the whole planet can - and should - adopt.
Western values are worth dying - and killing - for.
The West is the greatest, richest, freest, best
part of planet Earth,
the heart of science and all knowledge,
the best hope for mankind.
Anyone who seeks its destruction
should be destroyed
themselves.
-
The World Trade Centre attack
(also here
and here)
- Images and video
- The Islamic Fascist killers
Al-Qaida
- Al-Qaeda members
- The 9/11 plotter
Zacarias Moussaoui
was spared the death penalty, although,
as
Charles Johnson
says:
"I don't know if anyone in our country's history has ever deserved it more".
- The Onion's classic
Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell.
""I was told that these Americans were enemies of the one true religion,
and that Heaven would be my reward for my noble sacrifice,"
said Alomari,
moments before his jaw was sheared away by faceless homunculi.
"But now I am forced to suckle from the 16 poisoned leathern teats of Gophahmet, Whore of Betrayal,
until I burst from an unwholesome engorgement of curdled bile.
This must be some sort of terrible mistake.""
- The butchers
- The left's denial:
- Since 9/11 seems to justify the war on Islamic fascism,
there has been a constant attempt by the left to deny, downplay
or hijack the memory of 9/11.
- Conspiracy theories
-
The "International Freedom Center",
an attempt to turn the WTC site into an anti-American memorial.
- Cox and Forkum
celebrate its closure.
"Goodbye and good riddance",
as one of its opponents says.
-
The heroes of Flight 93
(also
here
and here)
- the passengers who fought back against Islamist evil.
- Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs
- Bill Whittle
on the strength of free people:
"the fact remains that
.. one ordinary group of people on an ordinary flight on an ordinary day
defeated the very best that the global terror network could put together.
Our ladies junior varsity squad whipped the living shit out of their Super Bowl A-team
over Pennsylvania that day, and they did it because for one brief shining moment
enough passengers on that airplane went Grey."
- Blog
encouraging people to watch an account of Flight 93.
"Bring Kleenex, and thank God for
forty Americans who beat al-Qaeda before most of us knew who they were."
The spoilt, wealthy butcher
Mohamed Atta.
No, is the short answer.
Because nobody would have
tolerated the US government
taking strong action to prevent it
before 9/11.
-
Alternative history
by Gregg Easterbrook.
- Bush attacks Al-Qaida in Afghanistan before 9/11.
The world (including the UN, Blair, Aznar
and Richard Clarke) furiously condemns him.
He is ultimately impeached and disgraced.
Classic. Brilliant.
This is what would have happened.
-
Easterbrook expresses better than almost anyone else
why 9/11 had to happen
- why all those people had to die,
why the democracies
did not attack Germany in 1933.
-
Tragically, it may also predict the future.
Attacking North Korea now
would lead to unbelievable world fury
and get any president impeached.
The fact that it would prevent the alternative future
of North Korean nuclear attack on
a western city
will not matter.
- Pre-emptive war
- The tragic dilemma:
In many situations,
peace costs far more lives than war.
-
Containment and sanctions often kill more people
than a quick war to depose the regime.
-
Even doing nothing
often kills more people
than war to depose the regime
(because it leaves the regime in power).
-
Often, war is inevitable anyway, and the only choice is between
a short, early war when the regime is weak (e.g. 1933),
or a far worse war later when the regime is strong (1939).
It is irrational to choose the long war instead of the short one.
Pre-emptive wars can save thousands, even millions, of lives.
But nobody will tolerate them.
The
Clinton Administration
had Bin Laden in its sights in 2000
(picture from drone over Afghanistan)
but failed to kill him.
I was typical
liberal-left
At the time of the September 11th attack,
I still believed in the left-liberal universe,
and I was still reading
the
Irish Times
and the Guardian,
as you can see from some of my early links:
Then I start to shift to libertarian-right
So my first reaction to September 11th
was in the liberal-left press,
and I still tried to fit it into that universe.
Then I started reading the American media online.
And I found my political philosophy starting to change.
This was big.
This wasn't about Israel after all.
This was something much bigger.
These were beginning to look more like the Nazis,
come back again
in different uniforms,
with different names,
but with the same mission,
to destroy our civilization.
This was beginning to look like the absolutely
just war
that we had not seen
since 1945.
- September 11th made me leave the left
- This is the heir to fascism and communism.
The bombers do not have a small, modest cause.
They want to end our civilization:
- The 1990s are over:
-
It's the war, stupid,
Mark Steyn,
on the 2004 presidential election
- the first post-9/11 election -
and how some people still can't see that the trivial era is over.
This is serious, like 1940.
- "I'm like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca:
'I put that dress away.
When the Germans march out, I'll wear it again.'"
- "America, it's said, is divided into September 11th people
and September 10th people. I'm in the former category. I'm a single-issue guy.
All the other stuff can wait."
- "After Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto said that he feared all he'd
done was wake a sleeping giant. But it's been two years now. If you figure it's
time the sleeping giant resumed his slumbers, Kerry's your man."
-
The Great Divide
by Fred Barnes
- "George W. Bush
is a September 12 person. John Kerry is a September 10 person. The difference is real.
A September 12 person was traumatized by the terrorist attacks
.. on September 11, 2001. A September 12 person believes the world
we thought existed before the attacks doesn't exist anymore."
- "In contrast, a September 10 person was outraged by the attacks but not traumatized.
A September 10 person thinks the world still exists as we perceived it before the attacks
and thus hasn't fundamentally changed."
- Bill Whittle,
October 06, 2004
- Deterrence (part 1)
-
Let us assume that the left really do want to stop a nuclear 9/11.
Then they are simply deluded about how to do so:
"We both look at this:
[9/11]
And we both want to make sure that it - or worse - does not happen again.
...
We want to deter it from happening again.
And all of this rage and fury and spitting and tearing up of signs,
all of these insults and spinmeisters and forgeries and all the rest,
seem to come down to the fact that
about half the country thinks you deter this sort of thing
by being nice, while the other half thinks you deter this by being mean.
It's really just that simple.
...
It all comes down to carrots (liberals) or sticks (conservatives)."
- The left doesn't understand
because the left doesn't understand the wolves
that live outside our world:
"I used to be a carrot man.
Like most larval liberals, I grew up in a life that would be unrecognizable to all but the thinnest sliver
of humans that ever lived on this great rock in space
- that thin, thin sliver being everyone and everything you and I know and take for granted.
Reality - meaning the wolves - have never been so far from the door as they are today.
So believing in the power of goodwill and friendship, of handshakes and agreement and compromise,
of trusting to the good and noble in mankind was easy for me, for the consequences of being wrong in that belief
cost me nothing at all. I'd never been robbed, raped, beaten or victimized in any way. That belief in goodwill,
compromise, concession and trust grew as a result of being surrounded by decent people in a well-ordered,
lawful society, with a long history of compromise and cooperation."
- Outside of our world there is
a Hobbesian world of tyranny,
torture, rape,
oppression, racism, genocide
and proud, unaccountable, unrepentant evil.
"I wish it were not true
... but wishing does not make it so.
...
It would be nice to live in a world full of liberals. I say that as a staunch conservative.
It would be nice to live in a world that behaved like a Hollywood party or a university campus,
filled with kind, educated people with lots to lose, who cherish reason and responsibility
and are incapable of brutal, violent acts.
If all the world were filled with decent, compassionate, rational people, life would be a bouquet.
But it's not.
...
It's a damn shame, it really is."
- He describes what I went through, and there's no going back:
"We like to say that the world changed that day. What a ridiculous, self-centered thought.
The world didn't change. Our illusions about the world changed.
The scales had (mostly) fallen from my eyes in the years leading up to that morning.
But many, many conservatives (as I define myself) were born precisely at 9:17 am EDT,
when United 175 flew past the burning North Tower - an accident?
- and exploded through the second, on the morning of September the 11th, 2001."
- Deterrence (part 2)
- Every tyrant in the world is waiting and hoping that Kerry
gets elected:
"You lack the vision, Senator, to see this as a many-front war. You lack the insight to see how the sight
of Saddam crawling from a hole inspired an identical self-possessed lunatic to give up Libya's nuclear weapons program.
Iraq deterred Libya, you eternal defeatist. And all of the rest of the former free-range dictators
now hang on the results of this election to see whether they will get a man who has capitulation in his very marrow,
or one who has weathered unbelievable pressure, slurs and insults, and very likely thrown away his second term,
to face reality and do something.
Something unpopular. Something that he knew would make his poll numbers go down."
-
Our Old Grand Fantasies About Radical Islam, Victor Davis Hanson, January 21, 2013,
lists the following as the major errors westerners make in the long war with Islamism:
- Contact with the West Moderates Radical Muslims.
- The West Must Atone for Its Past Behavior.
- Israel Is the Source of Muslim Rage.
- The U.S. Can Solve the Muslim World’s Problems.
- We Are Largely Safe from Islamic Upheavals.
After September 11th,
I thought I would go online and see
what
the much-reviled American right-wing hawks and conservatives were saying.
I had never read their material before
(it does not appear in the Irish media)
and I was shocked to find that it appeared to be based on reason and
evidence, and a strong sense of morality and belief in human freedom
and dignity.
These,
I realised with a shock,
are the people who defended
us
against the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
The Irish Times liberals are
not the people who defended us against the Third Reich.
They would never have stood with the Allies
(and never will, no matter what).
Their arguments are much the same as de Valera's.
Their anti-American, anti-British
worldview is little different to de Valera's.
They are the heirs of de Valera, not Churchill.
I felt my left-liberal faith slipping away
with every article I read.
Emotion
Emotion has its place. The anger and fear of 9/11
allowed many of us
look at new ideas - such as conservative ideas - for the first time.
The liberal-left meme complex
is self-sustaining and hard to break out of.
Anger and shock has its place in giving new
memes
a brief window to invade.
As they say, "A Conservative is a Liberal Who's Been Mugged".
Many of us were mugged on 9/11, and changed.
Ultimately, though, I look for new ideas based on reason
and logic,
rather than on emotion.
-
Oriana Fallaci
expresses well the raw western anger of 9/11,
even if her analysis is poor:
-
The Rage and The Pride
by Oriana Fallaci
- I'm not a fan of Fallaci (*)
but God she expresses my anger at September 11th.
Every time I think about it,
I can't believe those murdering bastards did that.
-
And she expresses
my rage at
the European left - "the singing crickets and buffoons
who used to lick Pol Pot's feet"
- I think this contempt for the left is something I will now feel
all the rest of my life.
- (*)
Her writing is sloppy and emotional.
And it is devoid of hope.
She talks as if all of Islam is the enemy,
rather than the Islamist movement within Islam.
She talks as if Islam can't be liberal and tolerant.
But the same could have been said about Christianity or Judaism in the past.
People change. And religions change. Nothing is fixed, no matter how permanent it looks.
- She talks as if
the problem is bad races.
But this is a philosophy of despair.
The problem isn't bad races.
The problem is bad ideas.
The solution is for the same races to adopt new ideas.
Western values are for everybody.
-
You are wrong, Ms Fallaci,
by one of
the writers I like,
Amir Taheri.
-
He notes that Fallaci was anti-American in the past.
-
Whether she was even pro-Islamist back then
- with that trendy
left-wing sympathy for Ayatollah Khomeini -
I do not know.
The Iranian Taheri says she was:
"Her praise of Khomeini, and her vicious attacks on the late Shah,
are still part of the official literature of Iran."
She has changed of course since, and
now says about Khomeini:
"What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion."
The interview confirms again for me
that she is generally sloppy, emotional and illogical.
- I prefer
these writers.
"All Arabs shall arise and annihilate the Jews!
We shall fill the sea with their corpses."
- Hassan al Banna,
founder of the original Islamic fascist group the
Muslim Brotherhood,
calling for a genocide of the Jews
when Israel was declared a state, 1947.
Luckily, the Islamic fascists failed to carry out their genocide.
The American jihadi
Adam Gadahn
demonstrates Islamism's low and debased morality,
openly defending attacks on civilians.
"We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents.
Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value.
It has no sanctity."
- Omar Bakri Muhammad
sums up the world of the Islamist savages.
See
more.
"The term 'civilians' does not exist in Islamic religious law.
...
There is no such term as 'civilians' in the modern Western sense.
People are either of
Dar Al-Harb
or not."
-
Hani Sibai
makes clear what Islamism means.
|
|
Counter of
Islamist attacks since 9/11.
Islam, the "Religion of Peace", has carried out an average of
2 terrorist attacks a day, every day since 9/11.
|
|
Since 1995.
