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Last week, Israel’s Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times asking the question, “What were Hamas’s leaders hoping for, and what are Iran’s leaders seeking to achieve?” The answer began with a conversation that revealed the central problem with the West’s understanding of Islamic jihadism, one that still vitiates our foreign policy and plans for dealing with Muslim aggressors: our modernist inability to take religion seriously.
“What the Israeli military and political establishment failed to understand,” Gantz writes, “in part, was the extent to which Hamas was driven by the goal of waging religious war. ‘The intel was there, but I underestimated the jihadi component of Hamas’s and Sinwar’s calculus,’ a senior Israel Defense Forces intelligence commander told me early in the war, referring to Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader.”
This mistake in divining the motives of militant Islam marks the U.S. conflict with Iran and its revolution and “goal of waging religious war.” For example, in 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to direct the revolution, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, as David Farber reported, in a meeting with Carter “soft-pedaled the specific threat of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ to American interests.” Brzezinski also viewed the revolution with Western eyes. The religious revolution would falter, he argued, and require secular technocrats and experts, which would dilute and marginalize the clerics.
In an even greater failure of imagination and projection of Western principles, Brzezinski advised that the U.S. should “pursue relations with individual Muslim countries on the basis of shared interests, but our emphasis on moral as well as material values, our support for a world of diversity, and our commitment to social justice should place us in a strong position to deepen our dialogue with the Muslim world.”
These sentiments are an object lesson in the dangers of reducing other cultures’ beliefs and understanding to our own. No one with any knowledge of Islam’s doctrines and history would counsel establishing a “meeting of the minds” with orthodox Muslims––followers of a faith guided by sharia law bestowed by Allah–– by bringing up a liberal Western idea like “social justice,” or our foundational principle of the separation of church and state. The wages of such naïveté are glaringly obvious in the current ghastly mayhem and aggression wielded by Iran and its jihadist proxies.
Other features of Islam alien to the West have likewise been serially ignored or distorted by Western foreign policy mavens. Most important is the role of orthodox Islam in explaining the global ummah’s subjection to the West and its culture that the faithful see as heathenish and hedonistic. As Bernard Lewis points out, “From the beginning of Western penetration in the world of Islam, until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original political and intellectual responses to that penetration have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and community overwhelmed by infidels.”
The solution is a renewal of traditional Islamic doctrines, and waging jihad to recover the faith’s lost glory. This response includes restoring the Islamic faith’s lost dominance. Thus, the Ayatollah Khomeini warned, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world,” and jihad will be waged “[u]ntil the cry ‘There is no God but Allah’ resounds over the whole world.” Decades earlier, Hassan al Banna, who founded the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, wrote, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”
Fellow Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb––whom writer Lee Smith called “Osama bin Laden’s intellectual godfather” –– fleshes out al Banna’s vision of Islam’s purpose: “Islam came into this world to establish Allah’s rule on Allah’s earth, to invite all people toward the worship of Allah. . .This Islam has a right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path so that it may address human reason and intuition with no interference and opposition from political systems,” an obvious rationale for jihad, conquest, and occupation.
Today’s Western nations who ignore these motives, or prioritize instead Western ideas––like national self-determination, individual rights, education, equality of the sexes, or religious tolerance––will reap the wages of our arrogance starkly obvious in the depredations of Iran and its proxies.
Moreover, Muslims’ mission to make Islam triumph throughout the world is frankly imperialistic, a smear for jihadists only when used against the West, whose cognitive elites consider the word an expletive. It’s one of the most toxic examples of Western oikophobia, its fashionable self-loathing and pretensions to intellectual sophistication when denigrating their own civilizations. But as historian Ephraim Karsh writes, Muslim conquerors and occupiers for centuries “acted in a typically imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and labor.”
Next, unlike in the West, where two centuries of secularization has left our institutions and politics nearly bereft of religious passions or ideas, “In most Islamic countries,” Bernard Lewis writes, “religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian . . . in no Christian country at the present time, can religious leaders count on the degree of belief and participation that remains normal in the Muslim lands . . . Christian clergy do not exercise or even claim the kind of public authority that is still normal and accepted in most Muslim countries.”
This contrast reveals the danger of secularism in the conflict between the West and Islam, particularly as an impediment to understanding our adversary’s spiritual motives and aims. Instead, we look to material causes or psychological explanations whose roots lie in the material world, and reduce spiritual causes to neuroses.
Factors other than secularism have contributed to the West’s willful blindness to Islam’s doctrines that animate jihadist aggression. By the early 20th Century, Islam, the faith that dominated the West for centuries, was now subordinated to the West and its superior technologies and weapons. Islam faded in importance, and did not occupy the West’s attention as it once did when for a thousand years it invaded, conquered, plundered, and occupied large tracts of European territory.
In the Thirties, Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote about this amnesia: “Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past. . . The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed —but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.”
The vacuum of our historical memory of Islam, its doctrines, and its domination of the Mediterranean littoral, has been filled with interpretations and distortions of Islam that reflect our secularism and goods like political freedom and equality, concepts that have a different meaning in Islamic cultures, which is why jihadist theorists like Qutb called them “the debris of the man-made traditions of several generations,” and the Muslim community has been “crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.”
It is a testimony to Israel’s status as a Western nation that, as some Israelis think, such amnesia about the nature of Islam has led to the current war against Iran and its proxies. Despite the jihadist success on 9/11, we Americans still appease the jihadists, supported and financed by Iran, who are continuing to pursue our destruction––which Iran’s imminent possession of nuclear weapons will certainly make possible. Let’s hope we don’t have to learn that lesson the way Israel has–– by horrific experience.
Not only does the West not take Islam seriously, westernized Christian and Jews don’t take Christianity and Judaism seriously either.
Today’s modern Christians and Jews pay lip service to their respective religions but they have no idea what it would mean to take Christianity or Judaism seriously.
And thank God (so to speak) that they don’t. Because if they did that would be the end of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“Religion versus America” – Leonard Peikoff
Well T, if you don’t take religion seriously, and we don’t take religion seriously, how will we ever be able to stand up to a Jihadist attack replete with AKs and Muslims screaming Allahu Ackbar.
The fact is I can’t imagine you standing up to anything, even a stiff breeze, Mr. Individuality.
But hey, thanks for a 20 year old video that is supposed to prove what………that being an atheist secularist is going to save my life?
I guess we won’t be seeing you on the frontlines any time soon, tough guy. But that’s fine. I can only imagine you screwing everything up anyway, lecturing us with Randism videos.
We would lose our cherished “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” if the jihadis were successful in their attempts to overthrow our country.
Do us all a favor and just stay out of our way.
addendum: I love it when our intellectual leftist class starts talking tough and decides to take Islam seriously, from his cushy apartment building in NYC.
Yeah, man. Mr. Individuality. Pissing on Judaism and Christianity…..whining about “preparing the ground” and altruism.
You effing pu$$y. 70 years after Objectivism’s heyday no one cares anymore. What do you really do anyway?
He should be the West’s secret weapon, to be let loose on Khameini and his cohorts when necessary. If nothing else, they would be bored to death.
Please, as an atheist, don’t pretend to speak for me as an observant Jew.
In fact, according to our Tenakh, G-d Almighty is very clear about enemies and war and how to address evil in its infancy so that it does not infiltrate and contaminate the greater community. However, when people begin seeing themselves as gods, worshipping every form of idolatry and willfully accepting those offering license as noble thus requiring one to jettison foundational values that are the bedrock of safe societies they become easy prey for those with “religious” or “anti-religious” tyrannical designs.
My people, Israel, are seeing the very unfortunate results of adopting a western viewpoint about security in the mist of the Middle East. The heretofore capitulations and acceptance of enemies as other than what they are has incrementally lead toward our destruction. The idolatrous worship of leftism trains the ignorant in acceptance of submission. Who should EVER pay attention to such idiocy? It’s like someone from quiet suburbia telling a resident of the Bronx how to live!
Fortunately, some of us recognize enemies and evil and have no objections to its immediate destruction in preservation of life!
Can I make a polite suggestion?
Try to demonstrate that your theory will actually work in practice rather than simply attacking religion.
The views of an anonymous commenter will never change the beliefs of any religious person.
Taking religion seriously means realizing what Netanyahu meant last year when he compared Palestinians to the Amalekites, a people that the God of the Bible commanded Saul to “go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” In other words Netanyahu is an extremist who believes genocide is religiously justified.
It also means taking the Christian Zionists who think God will bless them if they side with Israel in an apocalyptic war seriously too, a big part of Israel’s support.
No, that quotation does not mean that Netanyahu is an extremist. The Amalekites attacked ancient Israel from behind, picking off all of the weakest and most frail, and it was for that treachery that their sentence was pronounced. The behaviour of militant Islam – and it is the terrorists that Mr Netanyahu has in his sights, not civilians – is remarkably similar. Genocide of unbelievers is a foundational tenet of militant Islam, not of Judaism.
True but blindness to the danger of Islam isn’t confined to secularists. Reagan supported jihadi in the fight against atheistic Communism in Afghanistan. Bush ignored Islam in his Wilsonian nations-building in Iraq.
Few realize that Israel is fighting a religious war, not a war about real estate.
And no one but Objectivists and a few others realize that Marxism is religion pretending to be secular, rational, science and that modern totalitarianism comes from Judeo-Christianity.
The irrationality of Judaism prepared the ground for the irrationality of Christianity and both prepared the ground for the irrationality of Islam and Marxism.
The absurd ideas of Islam and Marxism come from the absurd ideas of Judeo-Christianity!
“I believe that the medievals understood much better than the moderns on what basis to build a totalitarian society that would last and not collapse in less than a century. They did it and the people in the rising religious movement today know that full well. They’re the ones who have millions, upon millions, upon millions, of followers and a real insight into the fact that economics is not the crucial factor, but philosophy and culture are…. Religion has been the root of [totalitarianism] from the beginning, it has ruled in disguised forms, and still is, and now the disguise had to be stripped off… What socialism is doing is really helping religion, the bigger the statism, the more people grow accustomed to government rule over everything, the more people are ready for religionists to take over the lead from the more secular side… The socialists are building the basis for totalitarianism but only the religionists are going to cash in on it and take over.” – Leonard Peikoff
Oh oh the THX drinking game is now in full effect.
“The irrationality of Judaism “prepared the ground” for the irrationality of Christianity and both “prepared the ground” for the irrationality of Islam and Marxism.”
Repeating your silly “sky ifs falling” childish insults isn’t going to fix anything.
I’ve got a clue for you…..no one is going to teach your weak sister Randy Philosophy at any level, especially woke universities. You may have had a chance before they went woke. But you were too lazy to even get a degree. I also don’t think your moribund philosophy is going to end Iran, Islam, socialism, or anti-Americanism
70 years after Objectivism’s heyday no one cares anymore. What do you really do anyway?
So what are you doing? NOTHING !!! You freaking idiot !
The majority of the people in this world don’t believe in the Holy Word of God 100%…
The biggest interest to them is… Prophecy!
But… you’re so ignorant of the Word of God… you can’t speak about anything related to Prophecy…
I remember when you didn’t ever hear of the Rapture…
Your satanic allah worshiping fake church doesn’t do anything… but make people feel good for a couple hours. Heck… your fake church might as well be serving alcohol and plying music like the bar around the corner…
You disgust me Intrepid… you never have anything to say worth value… only criticizing other commenters…
YOU ARE A LOW LIFE… worse than a turd which won’t flush… going around on circles forever…
Uh, was I talking to you? I don’t think so. I see you brought your little friends along to upvote you.
Look Sumsy Wumsy, you are irrelevant to me. You are a circus tent clown show at best. All you have are kindergarten potty mouth insults. Very mature.
So have a nice day. God will sort it all out (along with you) anyway.
Which is also why the two state solution is no solution at all. Even if they did not have enough people to occupy the land, the Palestinian Arabs would prefer that Israel be a toxic radioactive wasteland where mutant feral wolves howl by night, rather than that it be a place of Jewish flourishing.
the current problem with western sensibilities and the elite is due to 2 reasons , 1 they havent read the koran and 2 they dont know what the bibles says . as long as they ignore the bible they will be working in the dark . there is no moderate islam . its a cancer that has to be eliminated . unfortunately the west dont have the kit to carry out what is needed . remove muslims from all democracies , because the moment they set foot in your country it automatically belongs to the caliphate and is just the first step in commandeering the west . then comes sharia and defiance of western law . the police have been told to tolerate their jihadi mindset and to tolerate their appalling behaviour at the risk of islamaphobia . australia has had just that experience . nazi symbols are banned but hezbollah flags are acceptable . its only a matter of time .
There is no moderate Christianity or moderate Judaism either. Bothe religions when practiced seriously result in the tyranny of theocracy just like Islam.
What we have today in the West is watered-down, diluted, Christianity and diluted Judaism. Unserious Christianity and unserious Judaism.
Cafeteria Christianity and Cafeteria Judaism.
The vast majority of today’s Jews and Christians have been so secularized by the influence of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, by the ascendancy of reason over faith, they don’t even realize that they are practicing Cafeteria Judaism and Cafeteria Christianity.
Gee, I can’t wait for Cafeteria Objectivism. Because when practiced seriously we will be sitting around in smelly one room walkups, whining about altruism and rational selfishness.
I sense anger T. No one seems to be giving you the time of day.
70 years after Objectivism’s heyday no one cares anymore. Oh God….I lost my copy of “We, The Living”
So… you’re suggesting everyone start attending homosexual loving, allah worshiping fake churches like yours ???
Your fake church is so secular and leftist… it stinks… it’s full of dead bodies…
Again, was I talking to you? No I wasn’t.
Feeling lonely? Your message to the world not getting through? Why am I not surprised?
Not true. The Constantinian state church certainly claims to be theocratic (but its syncretism proves this not to be the case). Jesus said “The Kingdom of God is within you”. When He writes His laws on our hearts, we do not need any of the scaffolding of theocracy because we are in a love relationship with Him, and all we want is to please the One we love most, who gave Himself for us.
A Christianity that necessarily led to theocracy would die out in the countries where this is not possible, instead of which the church is at its most vibrant under persecution.
John Blackman – Good points you’ve made about Islam. Also, the
time to speak against them is when their demographic is small.
See my comment below as to why unfortunately that is usually not
possible.
Once their numbers start growing – and even if people could freely
speak against Islam – Muslims are known to threaten and intimidate
people who criticize – even putting threats into murderous action.
Imagine the fear of speaking out when facing death threats.
unfortunately annie the trojan horse is inside the gates and it is now too late . the barbarians are now loose in the city , some we know most we dont .
People simply have no idea. They invite Muslims to inter-faith services, not knowing that as soon as the Koran is read in a building, it is held to belong to Islam.
Hilaire Belloc, seriously? FrontPageMag can’t go a single day without supporting a right-wing antisemite, can it.
Slammy sammy can’t go a single day without whining about conservatives. Are you a tranny?
Intrepid… always pretending to be the Brave one… but sissy and scared enough to take the Vaccine
Intrepid can’t go a day without being an idiot…
Are you saying that conservatives are antisemitic ???
Why don’t you define what a “Right-wing antisemite” is for us? Are you bisexual?
You attend a homosexual loving fake church… which worships the fake god allah…
You have to be Bisexual… you idiot…
Your comments get more stupid and desperate by the hour. And your lame-o insults are always good for a laugh. But please, go ahead….waste your life on your moronic paranoid “prophecies” that no one but the freaks care about.
You aren’t even worth downvoting.
Islam is the dominant religion in almost all British cities. The churches open on Sunday for one or two services. They may do some other charitable work during the rest of the week but only have services on Sunday.
Mosques have prayers five times a day.
The difference, though, is that Islam is demonic. Yes, it is a terrible reflection on Christianity that they should worship their demon more faithfully than many Christians worship God – but ultimately, Satan, aka Allah, can only act within the limits that God sets for him, and once some of the compromised Christians repent, He will use them to set limits on Islamic expansion, not by using physical weapons, but by addressing the evil at source, thus setting the captives free. I remember when I was a young Christian, and I stood at a bus stop across the road from a mosque and prayed silently for the men coming out. And I heard the demons screaming because of whatever it was that God was doing in answer to my prayers.
I think war is coming, and Iran will lose bigly, and after that, the middle east will become a lot more secular. The holy wars are over and its time to get with the times. Organized religion its people and entire countries against each other, and the weapons of war only get better and more lethal with time. Thermonuclear martyrdom awaits…
Forgive me for pointing to Churchill’s quote once again, but….
“The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.”
An analogy of this type of naivete’ that Mr. Thornton writes of might be what I heard an airline spokesman tell reporters soon after 9/11… that they should train the flight attendants in hand-to-hand combat.
As if a 120 pound female was going to be able to switch over from helping an elderly passenger, to immediately taking-on a 200 pound hardcore, highly-trained religious psycho, who’s been praying for years that at this very moment, NOTHING would stop him from taking over that cockpit and destroying that tower.
One might ask, where does virtue stand in this fight for civilization?
Oikophobia? Remember W.S. Gilbert? “The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone/ All centuries but this, and every country but his own.”
Gantz is not in the government now; he was defense minister in 2022.
fsy – True. Good catch. Yoav Gallant is Minister of Defense in
Israel at present.
Excellent article. Mary Habeck’s “Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and theWar on Terror” (Yale University Press, 2006) makes the same point — a historical monograph about the modern emergence of “Islamism” in its various flavors.
If you wanted to know there is no separation of Church and Sate anywhere in the U.S. Constitution it just prophibits having Established Religion
During all the years of my long life, I remember an incident which, at the
time, puzzled and shocked me. And that was – in 2015 watching a massive
column of young Muslim men march unimpeded into Germany. Angela
Merkel – loyal follower of the New World Order and Globalist Communist –
welcomed them with open arms. Unbeknownst at the time, her fellow
leaders in countries throughout Europe would do the same – to aid their
takedown and utter destruction of Western civilization. Including and
especially in America and even Israel.
So maybe the prism of secularism does distort the danger from Islam – to
a small degree. But it’s hard to believe that military strategists and scholars!
and even some astute politicians wouldn’t come to understand what Islam
really is. The failure of the American public to comprehend murderous Islam
is due to a deliberate distortion of it on the part of our leaders and thinkers.
The 9/11 victims had no sooner crashed or fallen to their deaths than lying
George W. Bush rushed to assure us that ‘Islam is a Religion of Peace” and
to not castigate Muslims. Any justifiable criticism of Islam since then has
been shouted down with cries of “Islamophobia” – another lie. So much so,
there is a worldwide (globalist) threat to make criticism of Islam prosecutorial
hate speech – the American First Amendment be damned.
The blurring of backward-thinking barbaric Islam is deliberate. It is planned.
It is the meanness and evil of a Communist-type tyranny found anywhere in
history. And many of the ever-struggling We The People are beginning to
realize it.
It’s a good idea not to take at face value the claim that the word Islam means “peace.” For example, the ENCARTA WORLD ENGLISH DICTIONARY copyright 1999 defines Islam as “submission” based on the word “aslama” meaning “he surrendered.” Given the definition it’s an odd phenomenon that after about fourteen hundred years starting on September 12, 2001 the meaning changed from “submission” to “peace.” It’s very well known that if the police are questioning someone and he changes his story something is wrong. Nevertheless, when it comes to Islam no one gets suspicious of the change. The jihadists brag that they will win the war against the West by using the Western ignorance and naive gullible mindset on the subject of Islam against us. It seems that they do have some basis in that claim since so many Westerners are beguiled by the Muslim disinformation campaign.
For the terrible reality is that Islam is a religion of brutal blood vicious violence,
As the Quran instructs devout Muslims in Surah 2:191. 9 :5. 123,
If a Muslims terrorist is a “lone wolf “ jihadist stabber of shooter and or jihadists ,as in a group of an Islamic terror entity, as in the history of those horrendous murderous and destructive jihad terror affront attacks which occurred of 9/11 and 10/7, it’s based on Qu’ran based Islam.
Many people assume that “Radical Islamic Terrorism” to be a “warped” or “hijacked” form of Islam. Yet the terrible harsh reality is that the actual religion of Islam is the entire foundation of Islamic terrorism or otherwise accurately, but seldom called what is really is, which is “Muslim terrorism.”
For Islam’s “holy book” the Qur ‘an [the Koran] instructs on the use of violence and killing for the advancement of Islam.
As found in ,for example 2:191. 4:89. 5:33. 9:5,111,123. 47:4. Furthermore, it may be illustrated that if Islam is represented as a tree then the fruits then the fruits of that tree are the many brutal, violent and deadly jihad terror entities. As Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic jihad.
With this statement, the Wisdom of the teachings of Jesus may, very much, apply to this subject. For Jesus taught, “You do know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bears forth good fruit; but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.” After saying, this Jesus told them what He told them when He said “By their fruit you will know them.” Matthew 7:16, 17, 18,.20. [N.K.J.V.]
In conclusion, Islam is a corrupt tree and also a false religion, Proverbs 14:12. John 14:6. First John 2:22,23. 4:14,15. 5:12,13,20.
When I finished US Army Special Forces training in 1970 we were taught that you HAVE to understand how the enemy THINKS. No matter how different it was from how WE think! This is why Army SF units are so successful when our hands are not tied behind us by politicians!!!!! I really find it hard to believe that Israeli leaders do not know how Islam thinks as they haves been living among them for over a thousand years. I suspect that their schools are doing their part to keep their people ignorant like ours are.
I also suspect that politics pays a GREAT deal with government actions. They were surprised when hit in 1973 (Yom Kapoor War) and now the attack on in October 2023.. That and Israeli law doesn’t allow citizens to have a gun, unless on active duty. Even the security forces had to keep them locked up and could get them if an attack occurred.
People get the government they DESERVE!
Retired Army SF Master Sergeant.
This is the centuries old battle between Isaac and Ishmael. It is an existential problem. Islam is the polar opposite of Christianity. It is a satanic belief system. Jesus came into the world and made it a better place. Nothing Mohammed (if he existed even) made the world better. Just spread misery. The spread of Islam by bloody conquest is almost like the earth opened up and demons spread out. Christianity/Judaism, Islam and Marxism are all in a battle for the souls on earth. Only one is truly good. Our secularist society has lost the ability to discern good from evil, thinking all belief systems have merit. Furthermore, they dismiss the idea of evil, so they cannot recognize it.
Stop It !!!
Stop pushing the idea that Iran is the only threat to this world… IT IS NOT !!!
It is ALL of satanic islam…
Shiite Iran is a smokescreen for Sunni islam… the media is controlled and influenced by Sunni islam…
Naturally they’d make the masses believe it’s all Iran…
Sunni islam makes up 95% of the satanic islamic world… and most every deadly attack that’s happened in modern history has been done by Sunni’s.
SMH…
As a non Jew who strongly supports Israel as the one country in the Middle East in which there is respect for freedom and individual rights (FAIR), I wholeheartedly agree that the West is failing miserably to deal with followers of Islam (FOI). But I don’t think the reason for that is a lack of interest or respect for religion per se. To me, what has happened is that most Western countries, England, France, Germany, in fact the EU, are now controlled by the left. (What happens in America may well be determined by the upcoming election since a lot of people seem determined to vote for an outright communist.) Worldwide, the now fully nihilist left hates and fears FAIR which is why, world wide, the left embraces, allies themselves with, their ‘blood brothers and sisters’, FOI. Witness the recent left wing driven surge in anti Semitism, The left’s goals are the destruction of FAIR and replacement with a socialist/communist police state. In that context, the left will always back cheap vicious murdering thugs like Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. The solution is to recognize that FAIR are absolutely crucial to human life; that is, where FAIR is respected and implemented,, human beings flourish, and where FAIR are extinguished in favor of left wing tyranny, the result is millions of murdered victims. The religious fighting the secular seems to me to miss the point. The issue is how we as decent human beings want to be governed. I want to live in free country in which anyone can worship as he or she chooses assuming that he or she respects the rights of others to do the same. (This points out one obvious disgusting defect of Islam which calls for the murder or enslaving of all ‘non believers’.) Despite the obvious deterioration in American culture and politics., I look forward to a resurgence in FAIR which shouldobliterate the problem of how to deal with FOI.