Posted: 14 Sep 2014 10:24 AM PDT
Every week another lad or lass from St. Louis, Toronto or Sydney
makes the trip through Turkey to the Islamic State. A reporter dispatched by
a local paper to talk to the neighbors scribbles down the same recollections
about how nice and normal Jihad Joe or Jihad Jane was.
Classmates remember a loud partier or a shy student. Neighbors mention that
everything seemed normal until those last few years when he began wearing a
robe and she began wearing a burka.
The Somali and Algerian immigrants, the German and American converts, the
black burkas and dyed beards, headed into the dying summer to kill Christians
and Kurds, Turkmen and Shiites, to behead babies and crucify critics, don’t
seem like monsters. They loved their parents. They posed for jokey snapshots
on Facebook. They had dreams of becoming biologists or boxers. Until they
began killing people, they seemed just like the rest of us.
And with one difference, they were.
The forensic examinations of their lives rarely reveal anything of
significance. The extensive digging into the lives of the Boston bombers told
us nothing about why they would plant a bomb near a little boy.
The answer lay in the topic that the media carefully avoided. As with the
other Muslim terrorists, the meaning of their motives was in the little black
book of their religion which commanded them to kill.
The Jihadist isn’t a serial killer. While there are some converts attracted
to Islam for its violence, the Muslim convert usually doesn’t convert for the
killing, he kills because he converted. Likewise the nice Muslim Jihadist
next door might well be moderate by inclination and immoderate by faith.
As the Koran says, “Fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful
to you. But perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you
love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah knows, while you know not.”
(Quran 2:216)
Allah knows you have to kill. Even if you think you shouldn’t.
The nice Jihadists flocking to rape Yazidi girls in Mosul are convinced that
Allah knows best and his Caliph knows best. The worst of them are acting on
impulse. The best of them are acting on faith.
Faith is irrational. Believers believe without understanding and act without
thinking. The holy men of our religions acted on faith. So do the holy men of
Islam. It’s what they have faith in that is the problem.
Charles Manson’s girls, Jim Jones’ followers and Mohammed’s companions all
believed in much the same things. They saw the world as a fundamentally
hostile place and they believed that only one man could change the world. And
they believed that people had to die for that change to come about.
In a multicultural environment in which we believe that all religions are the
same, we don’t like to think about what might have happened if Charles Manson
had a million groupies instead of a few elderly women locked up in prison.
Nor do we like to think about how we would handle Jim Jones if he were
running California, instead of just being closely linked to the political
infrastructure of the men like Governor Brown and Harvey Milk who did run it.
It’s easy to dismiss a small enough religion as a cult because its leader
sleeps with young girls and its members are willing to kill for him. But when
the cult grows big enough, we say it’s a religion of peace and hope that its
followers believe the peaceful version of Islam that the infidels preach to
them.
And they never do. Why should they?
Mohammed
was quite clear about what he wanted. For all the abrogations, the Koran is
reasonably clear on what it expects its followers to do. Mohammed’s history
was that of a man who tried to convince the Arabs that he had seen an angel
by telling them and failed, and who succeeded only when he killed enough of
them, not to mention the Jews and any other infidels hanging around the
place.
That is the history of Islam.
Germany was not a nation of monsters. It was a nation that behaved
monstrously. The average German would not stick his neighbor in an oven in
his basement or chain him up as a slave. He would however do these things in
Poland because he was contextually contaminated by a monstrous ideology.
As an individual he was a nice man who loved his children, petted his dog and
enjoyed street fairs. As a loyal member of a system run by the Nazi Party, he
would do monstrous things. And then when the Nazi machine was switched off,
he would go home to his wife and children without ever killing anyone else.
He was not a good man. Good men don’t do the things he did. But he wasn’t a
budding serial killer. He was just doing what a death cult told him to do.
The problem isn’t “radicalization”. What Western governments call
radicalization is the process by which the Muslim becomes aware of the
dictates of his faith and their relevance to his life. It’s not the internet
preachers with their fatwas. They are just the vectors for that awareness.
The problem is Islam.
The current misguided thinking is that we can win a debate between a “good
Islam” and a “bad Islam”. The good Islam will tell Muslims to refrain from
joining ISIS, to work for social change, to embrace diversity and to champion
democracy. But this “good Islam” is just a liberal’s conception of what religion
should be. Its only real followers are liberal non-Muslims and it has little
to do with what Islam really is.
Within the historical context of Islam and in the words of the Koran, our
idea of the good Muslim is actually a very bad Muslim. And our idea of the
bad Muslim is the best of all Muslims. When we argue that Islam is a religion
of peace, we are pushing against the full weight of over a thousand years of
history and religious ideas and counting on Muslims to be too ignorant of
them to know any better.
Those who genuinely want to change Islam will not do it by lying to Muslims
about their religion. Trying to convince the nice Jihadist next door that
Mohammed would have rejected his expedition to rape and pillage non-Muslims
in Syria is futile. The nice Jihadist may not be a scholar, but he knows his
Koran.
If they want to change his mind, they will have to be honest about what Islam
is.
Mohammed
would have been as happy rampaging around Iraq and Syria as a pig rolling around
in dung. ISIS is Islam. It’s the naked religion. There are no angels or
djinns, no revelations, just piles of mutilated corpses and children playing
with severed heads while other children are raped in prison cells.
It’s Mohammed, but it’s also Saddam Hussein, Bashar Assad and Gaddafi. Islam
doesn’t end the cycle of tyranny and oppression. It is the reason that the
cycle continues.
“Deradicalizing” the nice ISIS Jihadist by lying to him will fail in the long
run. Telling him the truth and offering him a clear choice is the only way.
Americans were brutally honest about the evils of Nazism, but failed to
equally condemn Communism. Germany hasn’t had another Fuhrer, but Russia is
back to acting a lot like the Soviet Union. And while Nazism is confined to
trailer parks, sympathy for the red devil is prevalent among Western elites.
ISIS is exposing its own evil to the West in a way that neither the
brownshirts nor the flyers of the red flag did. If we destroy ISIS without
exposing the ideology behind it, then we will have won a Pyrrhic victory
because we will still be fighting the nice Jihadist next door for the next
thousand years.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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