|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In the month since the horrific jihadist attacks on Israeli civilians, worldwide protests and antisemitic rallies, replete with Nazi-era slogans and tropes, began even before Israel launched its war against Hamas. In the U.S., these demonstrations include unprecedented coalitions of Muslims and “woke” leftists, a seemingly oxymoronic alliance, given that everything else Islam and leftism stand for are mutually exclusive.
Yet there is a deeper connection between Islam and the left, one that goes beyond tactical alliances––an inveterate hatred of the modern West and its defining goods like tolerance, political equality, unalienable individual rights, separation of church and state, and especially freedom as the birthright of every human being. And, most troubling, both Islam and the communist left endorse and have practiced brutal, indiscriminate violence in order to punish infidels and apostates.
Even before the rise of communism, its precursors, the radical Jacobins of the French Revolution, bespoke a “passionate intensity” redolent of Islam. Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1856 The Old Regime and the French Revolution described the revolution as “a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without religion, and without life after death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam, flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles, and martyrs.” Moreover, the French Revolution legitimized violence as the tool for regenerating mankind, as does Islam today.
Nor did it take long for Marxism also to be recognized as a political religion, a secular substitute for Christianity, which since the Enlightenment has been weakened among the Western cognitive and cultural elites. Historian Michael Burleigh has catalogued communism’s “cultural appropriations” of Christianity: ‘“consciousness’ (soul), ‘comrades’ (faithful), ‘capitalist’ (sinner), ‘devil’ (counterrevolutionary), ‘proletarian’ (chosen people), and ‘classless society’ (paradise),” to name a few.
Likewise, the memoirs of former communists collected in The God That Failed (1949) contain striking resemblances to Christian descriptions of the experience of conversion. French novelist André Gide said that his “conversion is like a faith,” one he would gladly become a martyr to. Arthur Koestler describes his conversion to Marxism as a reprise of St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus: “the new light seemed to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern . . . There is now an answer to every question, doubt and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past.”
Modern “woke” leftism performs the same functions for a generation of Americans who have repudiated religion, and have been badly educated as well. Of course, social and cultural fashions, spread by “social contagion,” account for much of their spurious moral preening and virtue-signaling, which provide badges of their superiority to “fascists,” “racists,” and “Islamophobes.” But the need for meaning and a justifying narrative is real and urgent enough to endorse publicly the Holocaust, and to celebrate the inhuman violence against Israeli children and babies.
And to ignore the incoherence and fundamental contradictions of their shouted chants and slogans, which echo the “useful idiots” of the Twenties and Thirties, those Western apologists and press-agents for the Soviet butchers. Not even Stalin’s treaty with Hitler in August 1939 could wake up thousands of Western fellow-travelers, who had lobbied against joining the war against Nazism, until Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union a few years later, when suddenly they they became passionate supporters and cheerleaders for fighting side-by-side with the capitalist running-dogs.
What else other than a similar rote fealty to a black-market cult can explain today’s protestors decrying Israel’s alleged “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs who, except for Gazans misruled by Hamas, comprise some of the freest and most prosperous Arabs in the region? Or their ignoring Islam’s brutality against homosexuals and transexuals, the woke left’s secular saints and martyrs? Or Islam’s retrograde beliefs about women’s inferiority, which these Western poseurs celebrate by sporting hijabs that signify their sex’s debased status? Or indulging vicious antisemitic lies and slurs redolent of Der Stürmer, at the same time they decry an alleged epidemic of “Islamophobia.” In fact, half of U.S. hate-crimes against ethnic and religious minorities––like those committed over the last month during the protests––are against Jews, and have increased 388% over the same period in 2022?
Next, both Islam and leftism dehumanize whole categories of human beings into enemies worthy of extermination. In Islam, “infidels”––anyone not a Muslim––must be eliminated if they refuse the “call” to convert to Islam. The aim of the faithful mandated by Allah is that the whole world must be conquered and subjected to the Koran and sharia law. The faithful must continually wage jihad to fulfill this command.
And like communism, the greatest infidel enemy of Islam is the West, the civilization that ended 1400 years of Muslim success and dominance. The U.S.––the richest, freest, and most powerful country in history––is especially hated. In 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood, the most consequential organization for modern jihadism, promulgated “An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America”: “The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
Soviet Communism had a similar global ambition regarding the capitalists and bourgeoise, regardless of any individual guilt or innocence. In November 1918, Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the secret police, wrote, “We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. During the investigation, do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power. The first questions that you ought to put are: To what class does he belong? What is his origin? What is his education or profession? And it is these questions that ought to determine the fate of the accused.”
Finally, both beliefs legitimize ruthless violence and torture in fulfilling their mandates to bring down the West, and both endorse the amoral principle “by any means necessary,” including terrorism, a weapon of the left since the French Revolution. Karl Marx himself in 1843 threatened the Prussian government, “We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes, we shall not disguise our terrorism.” Indeed, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, and every communist leader since have made good on that threat.
Our “woke” fellow-travelers of jihad haven’t descended to the levels of the gruesome violence of Hamas or the Soviet regime––not yet. But the acceptance and celebration of the savage violence Hamas inflicted on Israelis, and the once-forbidden public celebration of the Holocaust do not bode well for the future. Who knows what sequence of events will, as happened in Germany in the Thirties, create an environment in which such rhetoric will become reality, and the flaunting of brutal antisemitic tropes become a call to action. We may yet see today’s bougie day-trippers turn into tomorrow’s rabid storm troopers.
As for now, these demonstrations are inflicting damage by pressuring the weak and cowardly Biden administration into escalating its bullying of Israel to take a “humanitarian pause” in its campaign, an obvious euphemism for a cease-fire that would leave the Hamas butchers time to regroup, rearm, and return to murdering Israelis––as promised by a Hamas official who has threatened endless 10/7s until Israel is no more.
That is, unless the West recovers its civilizational nerve, and once again takes its stand for freedom against its enemies.
“ Yet there is a deeper connection between Islam and the left, one that goes beyond tactical alliances”
The connection is in the UN. It is comprised of mostly dictators and most of the dictators are Islamic dictators.
When I was young I was a member of the working class and fatherless and supported socialism, but, my teachers taught me to THINK and as I grew and had a family of my own I worked hard and today am what I would have described as middle class back then.
I’m not, I’m working class still, but I was taught to think.
Socialism failed everywhere it was tried, but the UN needs division.
A beautifully written piece!
You make it easier to see what is mostly hidden in our everyday bluster and myopia, laying bare
that urgent sense of foreboding and fear once so eloquently put by Yeats in ”The Second Coming”:
… vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
A much needed, and all too rare, clarion call to protect freedom against its enemies.
The West has lost its balls. Now is the time to sew them back on.
Pension off poor old Senile Joe. If he was any more senile, he’d qualify for secretary general of the UN!
All it takes is for one man (or woman) to stand up and say ‘enough of this miasma of commie diarrhoea and vomit’.
Enough!
It can be done, easily.
I’m not American, but I have always looked upon the USA as the torch-bearer of freedom. It is successful, which is why it is hated. It is hated, because it is successful.
I ask that my fellow readers do a search on what Sir Winston Churchill said about Islam. Very interesting reading.
Stay strong. We WILL win.
Freedom, liberty, individual rights, private property rights, the personal pursuit of happiness on earth, in other words — Laissez-Faire Capitalism — are values derived from reason. From observing the facts of reality.
The French Terror was NOT the result of rational thinking, of ideas based on reason, but of irrationality. The French philosophes like Rousseau and his absurd claim of the Noble Savage can hardly be called reason-based, in other words based on the observation of reality.
Rousseau and Robespierre were irrational, evil, charlatans just like Anthony Fauci. All claimed to be speaking of the facts of reality through the use of reason, logic, science, and the observation of reality. But just because a charlatan claims to be speaking of the rational facts of reality does not mean he actually is.
The American Enlightenment, unlike the French Enlightenment, was based on the actually reason-based philosophy and logic of Aristotle as augmented and channeled by John Locke.
Islam and Marxism are both religions, in the sense that both are derived from faith in the unreal. Both are mystical fantasies in defiance of reality. The same is true of Nazism, the Aryan Race is as much a mystical fantasy in defiance of reality as 72 Virgins in Paradise.
“When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements….
The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity [the facts of reality]. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.” – Ayn Rand
I don’t think I have ever seen a person who is so self involved and stupid as you. You are truly the king of mystical fantasy. Your dream of an absolutist Objectivist world, fortunately, will never be realized.
A lot of the irrationality you describe can be attributed to child abuse. Permanent anger. Dismembering strong anger. A craving for Power and Control. Hitler was an abused child. Stalin too. There are many, many others.
Hey THX: Why does the Bible tell us, “Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty.”
Private property rights? Excuse me, that’s called one of the Ten Commandments. “YOU WILL NOT STEAL.”
Another Commandment demands we WILL NOT ENVY (Covet).
Didn’t Ayn Rand rightly recognize Envy (Covetousness) as being the root cause of Marxism and its ilk?
As for just general “Freedom” THX, it’s called “Free Will.” God gave it to ALL of us. The ability to make choices..
The fact God expects us to make the RIGHT choices is another matter. Fact still remains, the entire “Freedom” thing exists from the moment you are born. It’s imbedded within your spirit, between your EARS. No matter how much the entire world and its populace may lie to you, or inflict torture or threats upon you, your true Freedom always remains: inside your spirit, between your ears.
Stop acting like the Bible hasn’t already addressed and covered every meaningful issue known to Man.
Even if you try and pile Technology on top of things, as in “LOL duh but ur lil comic book doesn’t say anyting about AI” , any truly learned Christian with even primitive teaching skills could educate you chapter and verse on the morality involved in creating AI, and the bulwarks which should be erected to prevent any possibility of a “Skynet” scenario (ala the Terminator movies).
You think Christians are so dumb, and Christianity so stupid and primitive. When in fact, God is way ahead of you, and already thought of everything you’d ever need to enjoy “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
But you no more listen to Him (yet) than our shared enemies listen to our Declaration, or our Constitution…
Corporate America is also involved in the destruction of the west.
I wonder, do all silly Hamas supporting white folk have to wear that smelly Schmatte (שמאטע) to show they are down with the Jew hating struggle.
Privileged Leftists are that pathetic.
“Death to the Infidels,” shout the “woke” Infidels. These tragi-comic Jew-hating parades by Western atheists look like the background for a Three Stooges routine… waiting for Moe to slap some sense into Larry and Curly Joe.
The destruction of Western democracies is down to a conundrum for which there seems to be no workaround: you cannot have freedom from Islam if you have freedom of religious practice in general. You can be jailed if caught taking a Bible into Saudi Arabia but you can push a trolley load of the Koran through Heathrow and get a stamp and a smile from the custom’s officer for your piety. In France you can ban the hijab in schools but you can’t ban Friday prayers anymore than you could ban Sunday Mass. The Western democracies are horrified to find a contradictio ad impossabile sitting in the foundations of its legal and political structures. The only way the apparent blemish can be dealt with is to sweep away the freedoms of the West and we know who is Hell-bent on doing that. We need freedom from religion -all of them. Forever.
Excellent column. Should be mandatory reading at least for the denizens of our garbage “news media.” Just yesterday I heard one of CNN’s talking heads whose name was something like Katie Turf say that Hamas became radicalized in 2006 after being elected to govern Gaza. Utter nonsense. It’s 2008 Charter rejected any peaceful resolution with Israel, called for Israel’s destruction and the eradication of Jews worldwide. The U.S. Dept. of State listed it as a terror organization in 1997, a decade before it’s election in Gaza.. Yet here this idiot is spewing lies or simply ignorant of reality and probably being paid millions to do so.
It’s as if the old Hitler/Stalin pact has risen like an ancient vampire from the grave. Hitler and Stalin are dead; so are Molotov and Ribbentrop and the Grand Mufti himself. The ghosts of the past have become a terrifying presence, especially since October 7. Roving Nazi gangs in the tens of thousands are roaming the formerly great cities of the west shouting Nazi tropes; “Gas the Jews” “Finish what Hitler started” or “We will slaughter you, and you will say that what Hitler did to you is a joke,We will drink your blood and eat your skulls.” There is a new and increasingly palpable sense of Evil roaming the world; it’s at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, Brooklyn, and London., Gaza and Jerusalem.
Lord, deliver us.
WHO FUNDS THESE PALESTINIAN UPRISINGS AND DEMONSTRATIONS, INCLUDING THE ONE THAT DEFACED THE WHITE HOUSE GATES???
Probably these Muslim dictators including the ones who wear crowns to stage themselve as being somehow legit.
///
Can someone explain to the rest of us why the leaders of Hamas, the world’s evilest terrorist organization which has just murdered 1,400 innocent people, are actual billionaires living their best lives in Qatar?
Hamas leaders are billionaires, rolling in the dough
By Monica Showalter
Can someone explain to the rest of us why the leaders of Hamas, the world’s evilest terrorist organization which has just murdered 1,400 innocent people, are actual billionaires living their best lives in Qatar?
According to the New York Post:
While their people languish in poverty and are treated as human shields, the leaders of Hamas live billionaire lifestyles.
The terror group’s three top leaders alone are worth a staggering $11 billion between them and enjoy a life of luxury in the sanctuary of the emirate of Qatar.
The emirate has long welcomed the leaders of the terror group and installed them in its luxury hotels and villas at the same time as hosting a vast American military presence.
It reminds me of Sunnis and Shias. They hate each other, but they are united in their Jew-hatred. Muslims and “progressives” have nothing in common but their Jew-hatred..