Posted on 08/03/2026 11:42:23 AM PDT by EnderWiggin1970
Iranians have adopted a new sport in the past few years: knocking the turban from a passing cleric’s head. There are points for technique and for how high and how far you can get their headgear to go. These are small acts of revenge against a hated religious elite who came to power on a wave of arrests and torture and who, as recently as January, ordered thousands of peaceful protesters to be shot in the streets. It’s also a symptom of something larger. Political Islam is in retreat across the Middle East and the wider Muslim world.
“The strange death of political Islam” is an idea that’s in the air at the moment. Rule by clerics, and by others who claim to speak in the name of God, is going out of fashion in the Islamic world. The New York Times carried an essay on this in June by its expert Middle East correspondent, Ben Hubbard. After the Arab Spring, he writes, there were many attempts to govern strictly according to Islamic principles. They failed. And so “political Islam in the region has withered.”
Every country is different and Iran has special circumstances: the Shia clerics’ grip on power was pried loose in the turmoil caused by US and Israeli bombing. The beneficiaries have not been the democracy protesters, but the ultra-hardliners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. So one of the few achievements of Donald Trump’s ill-considered war has been to shift power within the regime to those with even more uncompromising attitudes toward the Great Satan. A huge new mural in Tehran shows Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu) sinking beneath a roiling tide of blood. “You will drown in the sea of the Iranian nation’s revenge,” the slogan says, in English as well as Persian.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.com ...
<< Political Islam is in retreat across the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. >>
But on the march in Europe and throughout the western world
Thank the AWFULs and those with suicidal empathy in general.
Indeed, it is Trump’s fault.
Iran has transitioned from a theocracy under Khomeini to a military dictatorship ruled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
> But on the march in Europe and throughout the western world <
Yep. So overall, the headline is no cause for celebration.
And it’s not like Islam is on the way out in the Muslim world. It’s just becoming a little less radical. And the overall goal is still the same: conquest.
Meanwhile, like communism, political Islam is enjoying its resurgence here in the USA.
More of a sprint, than just a march.
“And the overall goal is still the same: conquest.”
~~~~~~~
Conquest, and global enslavement of the rest of humanity.
Not unlike the Democrat Socialists of America.
They are conquering via immigration and demographics.
They don’t need to do wild suicide terrorism to win anymore.
Osama bin Laden would have studied at Harvard University instead.
I see examples from Iran in this story and vague references to other countries. Political Islam is completely discredited in Iran and has been for years. There are estimates that half of the young, urban population in Iran (which is a massive segment of the population) is Muslim in name only. And if the IRGC and mullahs are toppled - a huge if - Iran will become one of the more religiously liberal countries in the Middle East. But that is Iran, a country with a rich, independent history and culture that is not tied to Islam. I’m not sure you can generalize Iranian examples to the entire Middle East.
The potential for tyrannical ideological control runs throughout human nature and human history, and to my view, Islam is a kind of 7th century desert marxism. Both have the same roots - and the same consequences.
Islam’s backwardness is being challenged and pressured more than ever by the modern West in the last 60 years, and that pressure is increasing rapidly with modern communications.
Like Marxism in Eastern Europe, if/when Iranians finally rid themselves of the Islamist ideology, it will be rejected root and branch.
The expansion of the MoFo throughout the civilized world has never been greater. Jihad continues apace today, tomorrow and into the foreseeable future. Totalitarians without borders.
“There are points for technique and for how high and how far you can get their headgear to go.”
If bin Laden were still alive.
He would run and win as mayor of New York City today.
We spilled a lot of red blood for that blue city.
Never again.
I don’t care if they nuke New York City and strafe the survivors.
It’s not our fight.
“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated” - Islamists
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