Abyss of Islamo-Fascism

Here’s one thing you can’t blame on President Obama: the politically correct approach to radical Islam on American campuses was well under way before he took office. “The Achilles’ heel of democratic societies, as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski once observed, is also their moral foundation—the principle of tolerance, which they extend even to those who want to destroy them,” author and activist David Horowitz writes in The Black Book of the American Left. “The Islamists understand this vulnerability and therefore have exploited it as a central strategy along with the intimidation they conduct through terror.”

“By deploying defamatory expressions like ‘bigotry’ and ‘Islamaphobia,’ they seek to stigmatize their opponents, namely anyone who attempts to draw attention to the political nature of their movement, its imperialistic ambitions, its support for terrorism, its oppression of women, its hostility to other religions, and its virulent hatred of Christians and Jews. By casting themselves as the victims of religious persecution, Islamists have succeeded to a remarkable extent in censoring and marginalizing these critics.”

Horowitz knows whereof he speaks. He attempted to draw attention to this trend in a series of events on colleges campuses, which Accuracy in Academia covered, that were, to put it mildly, tumultuously received. The founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center chronicles these efforts in The Black Book.

“From the attacks of September 2001 until the fall of 2007, the term ‘Islamo-Fascism’ had been all but banned from public discourse—most incomprehensively in the university community, the center of the nation’s intellectual discourse, where presumably every idea exists to be examined,” Horowitz writes. “Aside from a handful of conservatives and Christopher Hitchens, a radical chastened by the attacks of 9/11, virtually no one was using this term.”

“Or, more precisely, no one was willing to take the risk of using this term, given the kind of slander that CAIR and its supporters on the left were ready to direct at them.” CAIR would be the Council on American Islamic Relations.

This is the fourth volume of Horowitz’s collected writings, subtitled Islamo-Fascism and the War Against the Jews. You can get more recent information on this conflict at the Horowitz Freedom Center’s news website—www.jewhatredoncampus.org.

Oh, for those CAIR-less days of yore!

CAIR is by no means the only organization to take advantage of the “politically correct” revision of language and groupthink. They have been very good at redefining and misdirecting intent, so that things once considered good and proper are now mean and nasty, that it is somehow the VICTIM’S fault the things have gone so terribly awry.

Tyranny has been the condition of mankind throughout a large part of history, and unless a mindset that resists tyranny is cultivated everywhere and all the time, like a nest of weeds, tyranny will crop up again and again.

Even the most benign and benevolent of autocrats always has the seed of tyrannical power, the iron hand in the velvet glove. Partly because there is no counterforce to the practices that evolve, and also because the successors to the benign and benevolent ruler may not themselves be so kindly.

The American Experiment, highly successful for a couple a centuries, has always relied on the changing of the representative republic through orderly elections and free exchange of ideas, even unpopular ones, and the option of reversing those temporary agreements and establishing a new course in the face of changing conditions. There are no permanent answers, even to the most distressing social problems, and trying to freeze some aspects, or even any aspect, at some constant unchanging rigid standard, will only result in resistance and widespread disobedience of the law, as witness the experiment with Prohibition.

And now, under the guise of “freedom” a new tyrannical force has appeared on the world scene, the reassertion of the “One True Way” of Islam, considered to be so good, so fully formed, it needs naught but its full implementation to assure some kind of earthly paradise. The fact that so many have to die to assure this access to paradise is considered to be an annoying misunderstanding of the true nature of Islam. But what is to misunderstand? People do not like the idea of being killed off for no other purpose that to keep the “purity” of the high purposes of the True Believers intact.

The True Believers could just find themselves on the wrong side of history.

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