Radical Islamism: 'bastard child' of Marxism

In his stirring speech to the British on Sunday justifying the Anglo-American bombing of Kabul and Kandahar, Prime Minister Tony Blair warned against any tendency to blame all Muslims for the terrorist acts of Osama bin Laden and the Taleban.

"This is not a war with Islam," he declared. "It angers me, as it angers the vast majority of Muslims, to hear bin Laden and his associates described as Islamic terrorists. They are terrorists pure and simple. Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion, and the acts of these people are contrary to the teachings of the Qur'an."

Mr. Blair was here repeating what President Bush, other political leaders and almost all the responsible opinion-formers in the Western world have been saying since the 11th of September. Indeed, they have sometimes sounded more worried about the likelihood of ordinary Americans attacking Muslim immigrants than about Muslims supporting the terrorist war on Americans.

Our political leaders have good diplomatic reasons for maintaining this position. They seek to avoid even the hint of a war between the once-Christian West and the quarter of the world that believes in Islam. They hope to prop up the pro-Western Muslim and Arab governments in the Middle East and Asia, and to use military bases on their territories. And, of course, they genuinely want to prevent any harassment of Muslims in America -- not only for humanitarian reasons but also to ensure Muslims locally will offer no shelter or support to bin Laden's terrorist network.

Yet, however prudent these official assertions of general Muslim benevolence may be, they are not strictly true. Osama bin Laden's brand of radical Islamism plainly has a very large following among Muslims, even among Muslims in the United States and especially among Arab Muslims. Although Islam has no central religious authority like the Vatican in Catholicism, there are many mullahs who endorse his jihad against America and happily pronounce fatwas (religious sentences of death) on moderate Muslim leaders like President Musharraff of Pakistan. As Paul Johnson recently demonstrated in these pages, there are passages in the Qur'an that lend themselves very easily to a justification of holy war against the West and Israel.

And, finally, there are undoubtedly some Islamic traditions that in the past have promoted aggressive hostility towards non-Muslim believers and that today underlie and justify the cultural resentment of many Muslims towards a West that has supplanted Islam as the main world civilization.

Western governments tacitly acknowledge these realities when they fear that pro-Western governments in the Middle East and the Gulf will be overthrown by the "Arab street" if the war goes wrong in some way.

At the same time, Blair's soothing words about peaceful Islam are not wholly false either. There are peaceful and progressive traditions in Islam which seek to reconcile it politically and economically, if not religiously, with science, liberalism, market capitalism and the modern world in general. In recent years, however, they have been on the defensive before the rise of radical Islamism -- the politico-religious philosophy driving bin Laden's terrorism. This doctrine combines a desire to impose a "purified" fundamentalist Islam on "corrupt" Muslim regimes with a rejection of a West seen as decadent internally and greedily oppressive externally. Because it strikes us in the West as antediluvian and absurd, we tend to assume that it must be the creed of ignorant and impoverished people.

But it is a creed held by people with Western PhDs, advanced technical skills and vast financial resources as well as by unemployed youths -- by Muslim intellectuals as well as by Third World proles.

And that should awaken a sense of familiarity within ourselves. For the truth is that radical Islamism does not derive solely from Islam. It has Western as well as Islamic roots. Indeed, it has been well-described by one commentator as the "bastard child" of Islamic fundamentalism and neo-Marxist Western scholarship. Its Islamic roots are in the puritanical Wahabi sect that set out to purify Islam more than a century ago in what is now Saudi Arabia and that is spread today throughout the Islamic world by financial subsidies from wealthy Saudi believers.

Its Western elements rest upon the theory ( first conceived by the English Liberal economist, Hobson, popularized by Lenin in Imperialism-the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and refined in the 1950s and 1960s into the theories of neo-colonialism and "comprador capitalism") that the wealth and power of the West are based upon its robbery and exploitation of the Third World.

No economic historian believes in this nonsense any more -- it is amply refuted by the fact that the Western colonial powers such as Britain and France actually became much richer after giving up their colonies -- but it is preached by radical Islamist mullahs from Dearborn to Dubai. In this context it justifies overthrowing the corrupt client governments that help the West to rob Muslim believers, such as the Saudi regime, in order to usher in a new age of Islamic independence and prosperity. And that is plainly Osama bin Laden's main aim in the terrorist war he has launched.

In short, radical Islamism is a violent, heretical and politicized perversion of Islam -- in exactly the same way that Communism and Nazism were violent, heretical and politicized perversions of enlightened Christian democratic humanism in the West. It perverts traditional religious ideas and sentiments into new political ideologies; it derives its energy from the resentments of those who feel economically or culturally dispossessed; it employs the most modern techniques in the service of essentially primitive concepts; and it sanctions unrestrained violence and ruthlessness in pursuit of totalitarian power -- exactly as Nazism and Communism did in all these respects.

Because all three ideologies are what Burke called "armed doctrines," however, they have to be defeated not only intellectually and spiritually, but also on the battlefield. Nazism and communism were both the cause of long civil wars in the West. Once they were defeated on the battlefield or in strategic/economic competition, however, they soon faded away as philosophical forces -- though Marxism enjoys a lingering half-life in the corrupt literature and politics departments of some Western universities.

Radical Islamism is similarly waging an unacknowledged civil war within Islam. But the signs are that Islamic civilization on its own lacks the necessary resources to overcome this perversion of itself. Resentment of America and the West is so strong in the Islamic world that many Muslims feel a sympathy for almost any Islamic force that challenges them. Before Islam is ready to confront and defeat the spiritual claims of radical Islamism, therefore, the West must first destroy its prestige by defeating it on the battlefield.

And the West can and will defeat radical Islamism on the battlefield; it is just a matter of time. The mosque can then begin to demolish its spiritual claims. But not before then, alas.

Boy, am I sick of reading nonsense like this. The socialists who promoted the strains of socialism that we call Nazism and Communism were not Christians; they were atheists. Furthermore, there is no such thing as radical Islam, or perversions of Islam. There is simply Islam itself. Compare:

Jesus:

The Gospel according to
St. Matthew
Chapter 5
The Holy Bible
King James Version 2000
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?
And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Mohammed:

Medina Suras
The Chapter of Women
[Chapters from the Koran]
The Harvard Classics 1909–14
But if there befalls you grace from God, he would say—as though there were no friendship between you and him—‘O would that I had been with thee to attain this mighty happiness!’ Let those then fight in God’s way who sell this life of the world for the next; and whoso fights in God’s way, then, be he killed or be he victorious, we will give him a mighty hire.
What ails you that ye do not fight in God’s way, and for the weak men and women and children, who say, ‘Lord, bring us out of this town 19 of oppressive folk, and make for us from Thee a patron, and make for us from Thee a help?’
Those who believe fight in the way of God; and those who disbelieve fight in the way of Tâghût; fight ye then against the friends of Satan, verily, Satan’s tricks are weak.
Do ye not see those to whom it is said, ‘Restrain your hands, and be steadfast in prayer and give alms;’ and when it is prescribed for them to fight then a band of them fear men, as though it were the fear of God or a still stronger fear, and they say, ‘O our Lord! why hast thou prescribed for us to fight, couldst thou not let us abide till our near appointed time?’ Say, ‘The enjoyment of this world is but slight, and the next is better for him who fears;’—but they shall not be wronged a straw.

...
Why are ye two parties about the hypocrites, when God hath overturned them for what they earned? Do ye wish to guide those whom God hath led astray? Whoso God hath led astray ye shall not surely find for him a path. They would fain that ye misbelieve as they misbelieve, that ye might be alike; take ye not patrons from among them until they too flee in God’s way; but if they turn their backs, then seize them and kill them wheresoever ye find them, and take from them neither patron nor help,—save those who reach a people betwixt whom and you is an alliance—or who come to you while their bosoms prevent them from fighting you or fighting their own people. But had God pleased He would have given you dominion over them, and they would surely have fought you. But if they retire from you and do not fight you, and offer you peace,—then God hath given you no way against them.
Ye will find others who seek for quarter from you, and quarter from their own people; whenever they return to sedition they shall be overturned therein: but if they retire not from you, nor offer you peace, nor restrain their hands, then seize them and kill them wheresoever ye find them;—over these we have made for you manifest power.

Finally, this:

radical Islamism does not derive solely from Islam. It has Western as well as Islamic roots. Indeed, it has been well-described by one commentator as the "bastard child" of Islamic fundamentalism and neo-Marxist Western scholarship. Its Islamic roots are in the puritanical Wahabi sect that set out to purify Islam more than a century ago in what is now Saudi Arabia and that is spread today throughout the Islamic world by financial subsidies from wealthy Saudi believers.
Its Western elements rest upon the theory ( first conceived by the English Liberal economist, Hobson, popularized by Lenin in Imperialism-the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and refined in the 1950s and 1960s into the theories of neo-colonialism and "comprador capitalism") that the wealth and power of the West are based upon its robbery and exploitation of the Third World.
No economic historian believes in this nonsense any more -- it is amply refuted by the fact that the Western colonial powers such as Britain and France actually became much richer after giving up their colonies -- but it is preached by radical Islamist mullahs from Dearborn to Dubai. In this context it justifies overthrowing the corrupt client governments that help the West to rob Muslim believers, such as the Saudi regime, in order to usher in a new age of Islamic independence and prosperity. And that is plainly Osama bin Laden's main aim in the terrorist war he has launched.
In short, radical Islamism is a violent, heretical and politicized perversion of Islam -- in exactly the same way that Communism and Nazism were violent, heretical and politicized perversions of enlightened Christian democratic humanism in the West.

Stalin knew this and used the symmetry of centralized power over the masses, that of socialism's and that of a religion's tragic potential, to nurture and employ fascism ... by which such "powers" coerce people.

He did it to foster unrest throughout the OIL-"Arab"-Muslim-"world." To thwart the West.

If anybody would care to look it up, the training of terrorists on this planet, has almost exclusively been the work of socialist operations intent on producing obedient fascists.

We are at war against fascism and the socialism which supports it, regardless of the flag, or religion, or "in the name of peace" -movement banners it flies < - > socialism is a religion of "the left."

Well, some "leaders" of some religions' are socialists, whether they look like it ["in uniform"] or not.

Here's what another good Christian, Martin Luther, thought about "loving his enemies". I thought of replacing Jews with Muslims, but decided to post it as is:

What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blaspemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must pratice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengenance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere advice:
First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly - and I myself was unaware of it - will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.
Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies. This will bring home to them that they are not masters in our country, as they boast, but that they are living in exile and in captivity, as they incessantly wail and lament about us before God.
Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. (remainder omitted)
Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. For they have justly forfeited the right to such an office by holding the poor Jews captive with the saying of Moses (Deuternomy 17 [:10 ff.]) in which he commands them to obey their teachers on penalty of death, although Moses clearly adds: "what they teach you in accord with the law of the Lord." Thoses villains ignore that. They wantonly employ the poor people's obedience contrary to the law of the Lord and infuse them with this poison, cursing, and blasphemy. In the same way the pope also held us captive with the declaration in Matthew 16 {:18], "You are Peter," etc, inducing us to believe all the lies and deceptions that issued from his devilish mind. He did not teach in accord with the word of God, and therefore he forfeited the righ to teach.
Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let they stay at home. (...remainder omitted).
Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. The reason for such a measure is that, as said above, they have no other means of earning a livelihood than usury, and by it they have stolen and robbed from us all they possess. Such money should now be used in no other way than the following: Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred florins, as personal circumstances may suggest. With this he could set himself up in some occupation for the support of his poor wife and children, and the maintenance of the old or feeble. For such evil gains are cursed if they are not put to use with God's blessing in a good and worthy cause.
Seventh, I commend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam (Gen 3[:19]}. For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.

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