Is Islam in crisis?

As the bombs fall on the heads of ISIS in Syria we should pause and acknowledge that no bomb will put out the fire that rages in the minds of growing cadres of ISIS followers in over 40 countries. We should note that our western civilization gave birth to a similar form of pestilence with the advent of the 20^th Centuries two progressive movements, Communism and Nazism. The Islamic Jihad has marched forth since Muhammad’s forces thundered out of Arabia in the 7^th Century, brutally destroying long-standing Christian societies in Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Spain. The Communist and Nazi Jihad, called Revolution, first reared its head in France, ironically, in 1793 when radical Jacobins co-opted the pro-American French Revolution with a Reign of Terror.

The ideology and the beliefs are essentially the same, only dressed in different garb, and we ought to inoculate ourselves from the disease if we are to be free from fear and terror. The similarity begins with a desire to replace sovereign free individuals, self-determined, under God, with an earthy all controlling world government. While Islam calls for dar al-Islam, Communists called for a Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Nazis a  New Social Order. The methods of achieving these lofty goals, wrapped in the case of Islam in the alleged language of “God” and in the case of Communism and the Nazism the high sounding language of “science,” is Jihad, for Islam, Revolution, for Communism and Blitzkrieg for Nazism.

Sharia is the Islamic version of the Communist and Nazi nanny-state where government controls virtually every aspect of the life of the person for the so-called common good. Islam, like Communism and like Nazism, seeks to transform humanity into a new type of being. In the case of Islam this requires total submission to their conception of God as, indeed, the word Islam itself translates to mean submission to God. For the Communist this is expressed as collectivism, which occurs when the individual surrenders his property, his right to trade, his faith, his family and his very identity for the good of the collective and in the interests of total equality. For the Nazi this involved a Darwinian influenced conception of the evolution of the human species through breeding and racial purity to achieve a more advanced and perfected human race that the Nazis called the ubermench.

Islam practices taquyya which permits the Muslim to lie and to subvert, when living as a minority in a host nation, if lying furthers the cause of Islam which is Jihad, Sharia, and dar al-Islam. Communism sanctions lies and subversion when this is performed in the interests of the revolution. The developed communist internalizes lying as a fine art by which he can seamlessly express two opposing ideas in the same sentence without being noticed. This highly accomplished form of deception is called the dialectic.  Nazism approved of anything and everything required to push forward the will to power. All three political faiths developed complex and sophisticated usage of language filled with code words, sophistries, evasions, lies and dog whistles meant to be only discernable to their respective followers. All three faiths maintain informal levels of secretive informal underground activity by which they conduct their subversions by means of fraud and influence and, when all else fails, war and terror.

The three political faiths employ versions of a central conspiracy theory which holds that an outside force is attempting to destroy them. They must therefore respond by destroying the outside force first in order to survive and succeed and, indeed, such destruction is of the highest moral order.  In the case of Islam, this outside force is the infidel, the dar es Harb, the world of war, the portion of the planet that has not submitted to Islam. For the Communist this force is internal, it is those who are deemed to be not politically correct, the enemy of the masses as identified as such by the approved elite theoreticians. For the Nazis it is the Jews. The perceived enemy is understood to be plotting to exploit or to outright destroy the righteous ones. In this sense, the three political faiths are involved in what Sigmund Freud called projecting, which is that they project their own agenda on to their perceived opposition.

All three faiths offer their adherents, most of who are recruited when they are young and impressionable; the exciting work of changing the world and human nature and of literally re-molding reality. Such a sense of power over others has intoxicated generations from time immemorial. Young people, most often from privileged backgrounds, are drawn into these movements as a response to their own sense of alienation and moral disconnect. Young people seeking to “find themselves” find in these movements instant acceptance and friendship with no effort on their part other than a nod in the direction of submission to a pre-set body of ideals.

All three faiths thus re-invent realities to suit their own image and these realities are divorced from actual conventional reality. The assumed right to create new realities means that the faiths, led by respective experts, can invent and re-invent morality to suit their relative needs at a given time. Thus anything goes in the name of the Jihad, the Revolution, the Blitzkrieg which replaces conventional morality as the only virtue that holds any meaning or truth. This is why the Nazi can participate in a Holocaust, or the Communist can participate in the forced starvation of millions, or the Islamist can machine gun people at a rock concert or a soccer stadium in Paris and believe that they are behaving morally. After all, it’s good if it’s done to advance the agenda of the new world where all of mankind is transformed.