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Everyone has known ever since September 17, 2001 that Islam is a religion of peace that a tiny minority of extremists hijacked for their own nefarious purposes. George W. Bush told us so on that day, as he stood inside a mosque in Washington, D.C., in the illustrious company of Nihad Awad of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was then the head of the American Muslim Council and was the most powerful and high-profile Muslim in Washington. Now Alamoudi is in prison for financing al-Qaeda.
Terrorism, we are told, is no more likely to emanate from those who believe in Islam than from those who believe in Methodism (if there are any left) or Quakerism. Ideology has nothing to do with it, much less religion: terrorism is a reaction to political oppression, and can be eradicated by showering money upon those who are designated as oppressed.
Why, everyone knows this. And, of course, none of it whatsoever is true. The fact remains elusive to the high-level negotiators who trust their good friends in Doha and know that they wouldn’t dream of leading them astray, as well as to the lavishly funded pundits and prognosticators who have educated those negotiators and ensured that they’re fully informed about just what makes the Middle East tick, but it is nevertheless true that terrorism is not incidental, or a twisting or hijacking of Islam, or of leftism, either. In reality, terror is central to both ideologies, and that’s one reason why they get along so well, and have established such an enduring alliance.
Terror is the tool the left has used since the French Revolution to keep the people in line. All the high-flown talk about bringing about a just and equitable society in which everyone contributes as much as he can and receives what he needs is for the rubes. And to be sure, many people actually believe it, particularly on college and university campuses today. But when it comes down to knowing that no matter how hard you work, you’re never going to be allowed to get ahead, because the government will confiscate the fruit of your labors and distribute them among the favored elites, the picture doesn’t look quite so idealistic. If you’re going to get the same amount of money no matter how much or little your work, why work at all? The answer is simple: because there is a gun pointing at you, and the gulag waiting.
Looking back on the glory days in 1935, five years before a minion of Comrade Stalin caught up with him in Mexico and planted an axe in his skull, Leon Trotsky said that Lenin’s decision to kill the Russian royal family “was not only expedient but necessary. It showed everyone that we would continue to fight, stopping at nothing. It was needed not only to frighten, horrify and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but to shake up our own ranks, to show that there was no retreating, that ahead lay either total victory or total doom.”
To “frighten, horrify and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy”: that’s what terrorism does, making the target too frightened to continue to resist. And that’s just how Islamic law works as well. In the perfect Islamic society, the stonings, the beheadings, and the amputations that Sharia prescribes for various offenses are designed to do just what Lenin and Trotsky wanted to do when they murdered the czar and his family: to frighten, horrify, and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy.” In the case of Islam, the commissar is Allah, and the leaders of the Islamic regime; the enemy is the terrorized Muslim population. Men live in terror of Allah, who lavishly describes in the Qur’an the tortures they will suffer forever in hell for not toeing his line. Women live in terror of men, who can beat them if they “fear disobedience” (Qur’an 4:34) and even kill them in order to cleanse the family’s honor if they get too far out of line. Non-Muslims live in terror of Muslims, who can void their contract of protection (dhimma) at will and thereby render it lawful for them to be killed.
Terror in Islam is thus baked into the system, to the degree that the system itself would collapse without it. And terror works the same way for the left. Terror is not incidental or accidental to either system. Without it, they both would die.
