Islam and the Clash of Civilizations

I am a United States Army General, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous; step one is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. So do my peers. And thanks to our problem, now all of America has a problem, to wit: two lost campaigns and a war gone awry.

—General Daniel P. Bolger1

We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.

—Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. Special Rep.2

The (Afghanistan) war has been a tragedy costing untold thousands of lives and lasting far too long. The Afghans were never advocates of terrorism yet they bore the brunt of the punishment for 9/11. Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has proved to be perfidious, driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons. Pakistan’s generals and mullahs have done great harm to their own people as well as their Afghan neighbours and NATO allies. Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy.

—Journalist Carlotta Gall3

Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice—once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.

—Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi4

The meat of horses, mules, or donkeys is not recommended. It is strictly forbidden if the animal was sodomized while alive by a man. In that case, the animal must be taken outside the city and sold.

—Ayatollah Khomeini5

The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.

—President Barack Obama6

ISLAM AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

When Arab Muslims turned planes full of innocent people into weapons of mass destruction on September 11, 2001, the question on nearly everyone’s mind was why. To find the answer, some pundits and scholars took a fresh look at the work of Harvard academic Samuel Huntington. Just five years earlier, in his seminal 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations, he had suggested that a conflict between Islam and the West was coming. One of the key arguments in his book was that international conflict in the future would increasingly take place along the lines of religious and cultural divides. In the wake of the Cold War, Huntington said, religious and cultural identity would reemerge as “the most important distinctions among peoples.”7 Speaking of this situation as a clash of civilizations, Huntington believed that “the relations between states and groups from different civilizations will not be close and will often be antagonistic.”8

When Huntington was writing his book the West was reacting with horror at the ethnic cleansing taking place in the former Yugoslavia. Westerners, secure in their belief that liberal democracy had triumphed over its last serious opponent in the form of Soviet Socialism, were unable to explain what they were seeing. Yugoslavs who had lived together for centuries and spoke a common language were suddenly turning upon each other in murderous rage. Huntington’s thesis supplied an answer: it was the Islamic, Catholic, and Orthodox identities which truly defined and inspired the Yugoslav conflict. The nation was a flash point where the fault lines between civilizations came together.

One of the chief threats to global peace identified in Huntington’s work is Islam. Looking at the state of the world in the 1990s, Huntington observed that “whenever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.”9 He brought in historical and contemporary evidence to demonstrate that Muslims “have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of other civilizations.”10 Predictably, Huntington is still chastised today by the politically correct thought police for daring to single out Islam in this fashion. But the hard truth is not that he was wrong, it is that he did not go far enough.

Despite his acknowledgement of Islam’s “bloody borders,” Huntington still identified the primary global fault line as the one between what he called as “the West and the rest.”11 But since 9/11 it has become increasingly clear that the real fault line is between Islam and the rest. Furthermore, this division is not one of the rest’s choosing; Islam chose it and has chosen it for over 1,400 years.

The cause of this division is not hard to find. Muhammad created Islam upon the idea of a fundamental split between believers and non-believers. Throughout Islam’s trilogy of sacred texts it is made clear that non-believers are the worst of people and to be treated accordingly. Furthermore, Islam demands conflict between believers and non-believers. In one oft-cited passage in the Hadith, Muhammad declares that he was commanded by Allah to fight everyone until they submit to Allah’s will.12 Contrary to what Islam’s apologists claim, this is not a spiritual or metaphorical battle; in his life, Muhammad demonstrated that the battle against the non-believers was quite physical, real, and permanent.

Following in their founder’s footsteps, the keepers of Islamic tradition have expanded upon and refined the basic opposition. Lands outside the rule of Islam are known collectively in this tradition as Dar al-Harb, the House of War. In keeping with Muhammad’s message and practice, the war against these lands is expected to be very real indeed. All Muslims are called upon to fight in this war—even those who would prefer not to involve themselves in slaughter.13 This is why the Islamic world cannot seriously oppose the actions of terrorists; the literal words of their religion sanction acts of terror and condemn those who do not kill infidels as shirking their duty.

The opposition between Islam and the rest of the world is of a different character than mere enmity. All civilizations may confront opponents from time to time—wars of opportunity, fought because one side thought it had an advantage over the other. Islam, however, sees itself as opposed in principle to non-Islamic civilizations. Hindus and Buddhists can agree in principle to live-and-let-live. Islam can only make peace in order to gain breathing room. Individual Muslims are even commanded not to be friendly with infidels.14

Islamic hostility toward other cultures is by no means something limited to fringe elements. Nor is it something that arose in response to historical suffering such as the Crusades. Instead, this hostility is commanded by the literal words of Islam’s most sacred documents. The full extent of the hostility is rarely mentioned in public, but this excerpt from a planning document prepared by the Muslim Brotherhood in America provides a taste:

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Brothers] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.15

Furthermore, the hostility inherent in Islam is so strong that without external enemies Islam will simply turn upon itself. This can be seen all across the Muslim world, where Sunnis and Shiites are regularly at war with each other or with other smaller Islamic sects. These internal divisions suggest that even if the whole world should become Islamic there would still be no end to Islam-inspired violence. Three of the four “righteously guided caliphs” (in the first century of Islam’s existence) were murdered. Islam was born in war and has been at war with the world from day one.

Faced with such threats, the Left in the West turns out to be little more than a band of useful idiots and apologists for jihad. “Islam means peace,” they say, but fail to acknowledge that Islam promises peace only to Muslims—and even there, it has proven unable to deliver for 1,400 years. By defending Islam and attacking those who dare to criticize it, the Left provides cover that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood use to advance their plans. Ironically, those plans involve undermining and destroying the very freedom Western leftists and liberals believe they are defending.

Leftists in America today style themselves as “Progressives” and believe they are part of a gradual improvement of human society from injustice toward justice, peace, and equality. This makes it all the more absurd that they would support Islam, which is a regressive and reactionary ideology that insists on bringing the world back to the morality of seventh century Arabia. Cultures progress when they embrace critical thought and self-examination, but Islam rejects such progress as unnecessary and unacceptable. If Muhammad was the perfect man and the perfect model for human life, what need do we have of progress, the literal Islamist asks. And if anyone dares to ask whether something better than what Muhammad imagined could be, that person is in mortal danger. This situation is the very opposite of what Progressives claim they want.

Still, with the help of the Left, criticism of Islam is often stifled by labeling such criticism as bigoted or racist. Acts of shocking violence are also employed to spread fear. Comedians and artists feel free to mock Christianity, but few dare to do the same with Islam out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo dared to treat Islam with the same irreverence it uses for other religions, and on January 7, 2015 Muslims broke into the magazine’s offices and slaughtered its top journalists and artists and their bodyguards. While most ordinary people were aghast and instinctively rose up to defend freedom of speech, some on the Left darkly hinted that Charlie Hebdo got what it had coming for insulting Islam. This response is even more telling given that the magazine itself is a leftist magazine that regularly criticizes religion, racism, and right- wing politics. Fortunately, surviving staff and contributors expressed resolve in the face of Islam’s attempt to curtail their freedom of speech through violence.

Western leaders held a march presumably to show defiance in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. But in the end they only demonstrated their own folly by refusing to acknowledge the role of Islam in the whole affair. The Muslims who murdered the staff of the magazine were only emulating Muhammad in word and deed. After all, Muhammad had poets in Mecca murdered for writing slanders against him when he was a street preacher. The Qur’an and sharia law both sanction such treatment for anyone who insults the Prophet. If Western leaders had marched not against terrorism but against Muhammad, the Qur’an, sharia, and Muslim immigration, the problem of global Islam would be at the beginning of its end.

If anyone doubts that there is a unique and implacable fault line between Islam and the rest of humanity, consider the example of immigrant experiences in Western Europe and America. Multiple waves of immigrants from every civilization in the world have found ways to coexist and integrate respectably and productively within Western cultures. Only Muslims have maintained a sullen hatred for Western Civilization that continually explodes in violence and barbarities such as the Rotherham sexual abuse scandal in 2014. Islam is a unique and principled enemy of all the world’s non-Islam civilizations. The rest of the world must defend itself and unite to oppose this implacable enemy.

THE WARS IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ HAVE FAILED

Opposition to Islam must begin by facing facts. The most critical fact to begin with is that the approach taken to Islam since the 9/11 atrocity has failed. This approach was dubbed a “War on Terror” by the United States, and the primary theaters of this war have been the countries of Afghanistan and Iraq. Using nearly every diplomatic, economic, and military resource at its command, the U.S. led two wars against these countries, dismantled their existing regimes and helped to establish new ones.

After 13 years, even the most optimistic of politicians and military experts in America will likely admit that the U.S. and its coalition allies have failed. The attempts to defeat the enemy and reform the political structures of Afghanistan and Iraq have been unsuccessful. The American people agree. As of January 2014, some 52 percent (according to a Pew Poll) of U.S. citizens agreed that America had failed to achieve its goals in either war.16 This failure has been enormously costly. More than $4.4 trillion has been spent and more than 10,000 American lives have been lost so far.17 More than a million veterans have registered disability claims with the Veterans Administration due to injuries sustained in this conflict. The final costs have yet to be tallied.

In Afghanistan, efforts to suppress the Taliban have been frustrated at every turn. These frustrations are due thanks in large part to interference from America’s supposed ally, Pakistan, on behalf of the Taliban. In Iraq, America oversaw the replacement of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime with one we believed to be more democratic. But the removal of the secular strongman has predictably reopened deep sectarian divides that pit Sunni Muslims against Shiite Muslims while exposing other religious and ethnic minorities such as Christians and Kurds to new dangers. In 2014, despite billions of US dollars spent on equipment and training, Iraq’s military forces proved spectacularly unable to deal with a new Islamic threat within its borders.

This new threat, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), represents a force that has not been seen in the world since the end of the First World War. Declaring itself to be a new caliphate, ISIS now aims at forcibly unifying the Sunni populace while unleashing genocide against non-Sunni groups. They have issued a call to arms that has resonated around the world, drawing Islamic fighters from as far afield as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Indian Kashmir. As ISIS seizes huge swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, secular regimes have been replaced or weakened by the so-called “Arab Spring” in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The world is more threatened by literal Islam than ever.

These developments show that while the 9/11 attacks may have seemed to be a wakeup call at first—a tragic warning of the deadly threat posed by resurgent Islam—Western leaders have failed to learn the lesson. Instead of dealing with the primary instigators of Islamic violence around the world, the U.S. responded to 9/11 by launching two interminable wars which stand out in American history for the confusion about one very important question: Who is our enemy?

This confusion was inevitable given the mode of thinking that has come to dominate American and Western politics. This mode of thinking could be accurately described as resolutely politically correct, self-hating, liberal, relativistic, and multicultural. It has undermined and poisoned all attempts to understand the threat posed by Islam. A perfect example came in the wake of the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood. An Islamic Army psychiatrist went on a rampage, killing 13 fellow soldiers in the name of Islam. It was a stunning blow, and it happened on a military base in America—a place where American soldiers had every reason to believe they were safe from jihadist attack. The response by then-Chief of Staff General George Casey was simply baffling. His first thought was for the Muslims rather than the victims:

I’m concerned that this increased speculation [about Islam] could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers … our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.18

Instead of asking why Islam could provoke a soldier to turn on his fellow soldiers and his fellow Americans, Casey chose to worry about a buzzword like diversity. This is typical of the failed approach to Islam; instead of directing our brave soldiers to engage the enemy, we expose them to a quagmire within which the enemy is shrouded in bureaucratic euphemisms.

In his straight-talking new book, three-star Lt. General Daniel P. Bolger notes that all of our various euphemisms for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (e.g. Operation Enduring Freedom) tip-toe around the truth. “Not one title for this war identified the enemy,” he writes, “anti-Western Islamists and the ramshackle, quasi-fascist Middle East states that enabled them.”19 Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden’s latest hideout in 2001, and the Taliban regime was a typically odious manifestation of literalist Islam, but who educated, enabled, and propped up the Taliban? It was Pakistan, an alleged ally in the War on Terror, and their support continues to this day. As most Americans know, it was Pakistan where bin Laden was eventually discovered, living in relative comfort next to Pakistan’s West Point. Where did the funding and personnel that fueled the Taliban come from? The Arabian Peninsula, and above all from another alleged ally: Saudi Arabia.

When America was attacked on 9/11, we had an opportunity to confront two virulent enemies in the Islamic world. Whatever the official regimes of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia may say or promise the fact remains that these countries are two of the primary sources of fighters, funding, logistical support, and ideological inspiration for Islamic terror. Responding to the 9/11 attacks by making war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda while tightening alliances with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia was like hiring a drug cartel to clear the streets of heroin dealers. Even if the mission is a complete success, the cartel itself will only supply new dealers in short order. It is always a mistake to deal with weaker manifestations of a threat than to deal with the source of the threat itself.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a misapplication of force, but the invasion of Iraq can only be called pure folly. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was a dictator and a brutal human being, but even in his own neighborhood he was a long way down the list of dangers to the United States. By 2003 Iraq had long been contained by no-fly zones patrolled by Anglo-American jet fighters. While loathsome, Iraq’s regime was at least secular and therefore capable of responding to rational arguments and force. Hussein had no interest in jihadists or theology. His regime was bad but containable. Saddam Hussein and his Baathist party were the secular enemies of Islamic fundamentalists.

The failure to correctly identify and oppose the real enemies of America was not the mistake of any one party or ideology. In March 2009, the newly elected President Barack Obama told the American people that our goal was now “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.”20 The problem with this approach is that al-Qaeda exists primarily as a brand name today. Jihadists affiliate with it for the same reason that others affiliate with ISIS: because they identify with the pure Islamic supremacism that combines jihad and imperialism. No one group has a monopoly on that ideology. And that ideology would not die even if every al-Qaeda fighter were to be killed tomorrow. ISIS and al-Qaeda are only manifestations of the ultimate enemy.

When Vice President Joe Biden visited Afghanistan in 2009 and asked junior soldiers to define their mission, he got a broad range of responses. Despite the variety, as Bolger reports, “the most common answer rang true: ‘I don’t know.’”21 As was clear to Bolger and others, “the mission remained obscure because the enemy remained ill-defined.”22 When American troops pulled out of Afghanistan in 2014 the question still remained in their minds: Who was the enemy? The inability to provide a coherent answer to this simple question is the hallmark of America’s failure in the War on Terror.

In fact it is Islam itself that was and is the greatest threat to the United States and the non-Muslim world. For decades, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have been two lynchpins of Islam-inspired imperialism and jihad. Any attempt at defining who our enemy is should begin with these two nations. But the threat is bigger than any particular nation, no matter how wealthy or influential. Even before our national enemies are identified we need to be clear about Islam itself—as a religion, as a political ideology, and as a metaphysical system. In the words of philosopher Shabbir Akhtar, “Islam is explicitly public, communal, and politicized, that is, coercive if and whenever empowered.”23 This means that the claims Islam makes must be taken seriously by non-Muslims because whenever Muslims get the upper hand they will attempt to force their views on the non-Muslims. It is not in Islam’s DNA to leave other systems alone. Islam makes enormous claims for its own dignity and respect as a spiritual and ethical creed. Are these justified? Is Islam a religion at all? What does it even mean to call something a religion?

WHAT IS RELIGION? MONOTHEISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, REVISITED

The word ‘religion’ is so commonly used that it is easy to assume that everyone agrees upon its definition. Yet there is no objective definition and no common core of ethical and ritual practices that could justify one. Attempts to produce an acceptable definition of religion are typically heated and inconclusive affairs. During one such attempt by the American Academy of Religion (an organization consisting of professors of religion at American colleges and universities), half the audience walked out in protest.24

Even the supposedly unifying concept of “world religions” is, as scholar Tomoko Masuzawa has described, a “slipshod, weirdly composite term” that conveys little meaning beyond the desire to impose a scientific façade on a distinctly un-scientific field of study.25 It is an attempt to combine together under one name practices and beliefs which share very little in common. Instead, there is such diversity of practices and beliefs among human beings that much of what one culture might call a religion another culture might call philosophy, science, magic, or mythology—and vice versa. What one religion considers holy can be deeply offensive to another religion.

For example, consider the belief in God. Followers of the three major Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) commonly assume that religion must include faith in a supernatural deity. According to these faiths, God created the world, regulates the world, and will bring the world to an end at some unspecified future time. But this core dogma of Abrahamic religion is not necessary for other religions. Buddhism, Jainism, and Confucianism are agnostic or atheist regarding the existence of a god or gods. Jainism in particular is a humanistic and naturalistic system that sees the world as composed of matter operating according to natural laws. Human beings, in Jainism, have the power to achieve their aims and ethical goals using reason alone, without supernatural aid or revelation.26

For the Abrahamic religions, God is transcendent and one, meaning he does not exist as part of the natural world we know by experience. In Islam, this means God is “separate from the world of his creation … not subject to its laws, moral or arguably logical.”27 Given such an idea of God as completely other and separate from the world, the question arises of how he can make himself known to mortal creatures. The answer in the Abrahamic tradition is that God communicates through direct revelation to certain extraordinary individuals called prophets. A core component of these religions, therefore, is faith in the authenticity and divinity of the exclusive revelations God makes to specific people. This faith does not require accountability, reason, or empirical verification of its claims. Islam actually goes so far as to believe that anyone demanding rationality is an unbeliever. As Akhtar puts it, Islamic scholars say that “whoever engages in (Greek) logic commits infidelity.”28

Other religions do not retain such a view of truth. For religions in the Indic tradition such as Hinduism and Buddhism, truth is open to anyone capable of learning it.29 It makes no sense to say, as Islam does, that any one person holds the “final” revelation of God to man. Furthermore, it is possible in the Indic tradition for truth to cross over many disciplines or systems. A Hindu, for instance, may choose to believe many of the tenets of Christianity without ceasing to be a Hindu. But a Christian who comes to think of Hinduism as true has ceased being a Christian—and this is even truer for Muslims. Abrahamic religions are exclusivist, meaning that the most important truths are exclusively held and taught by the religion itself and cannot be found elsewhere. It is not possible for a believer of an exclusivist religion to say “we have the truth and you do, too.” Instead, the exclusivist religion says, “we have the truth, and you have shadows and lies.”

For religions without god or with different conceptions of god, divine revelation is either unnecessary or subject to debate. In the Yoga philosophy of Patanjali, for example, God is merely the ideal of enlightenment toward which the practitioner of Yoga aspires. In Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hindu thought, the validity of divine revelation must be tested by independent, logical means. Listeners are persuaded to accept the validity of Advaita teaching by pseudo-Socratic dialogue rather than by memorization of dogma. Through self-inquiry and reasoning ignorance can be reduced and eventually eliminated. In Advaita, divine revelation is something subject to independent investigation, and it is only by independent investigation that one can obtain the correct view.

Our first step in combating Islam must be this: We must not defer to Islam’s pretensions of being above question or criticism. No system is beyond objective and empirical investigations. Why should we bow to Islam’s statements or even its idea of what truth is? If Islam contains the truth it must prove it, explain it, and demonstrate it. Above all we should remember that we are not fighting individuals here, we are fighting against an ideology. We cannot stop all uses of weapons of mass destruction, but we can eradicate the ideology that leads to someone wanting to use those weapons.

This is the great weakness of Islam, because criticism—and especially self-criticism—is almost entirely absent in Islamic tradition. One of the common refrains of the Qur’an and the Hadith is the phrase “Allah knows and you do not know.” The believer is repeatedly taught that he does not know for himself what is best. In practice, this has made Arabic culture more fatalistic than causal in its thinking. There is a tendency among Arabs (and Muslims generally) to believe that Allah will provide whatever he wishes to provide. There is little impetus within Islam to search out the secondary causes by which the universe operates.

But a religion does not have the right to exclusivist claims any more than its adherents have exclusive access to truth. Thought, persuasion, self-criticism and debate are far more characteristic of the truly great religious thinkers. And in the same way, real religious conflict takes place in the form of debate and discussion. For centuries in India this was the only form of religious conflict that was experienced. It was not murder but debate. The Islamic approach, where one group attempts to impose its exclusive claims to truth on another group, is not a religious contest but a bloodthirsty quest for power.

The exclusivist position of Abrahamic monotheism is the basis for conflict between its creeds. The pagan Greeks did not fight each other or with the pagan Persians because of different religious beliefs. They fought for the age-old reasons of land, wealth, glory, and empire. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism have not provoked wars to spread religious truth; these faiths were spread by monks and scholars, with the pen rather than the sword. Those who wish to cite the Hindu-Sikh conflict in the Punjab in the 1980s or the Tamil and Sinhala conflict in Sri Lanka, which ended five years ago, should consider that these were ethnic rather than religious (theological or metaphysical) conflicts. Hindus and Sikhs did not attack each other over metaphysical disagreements.

Based on the idea of divine revelation, Islam encourages its followers in the belief that their vision of the theological truth is correct and all other spiritual and secular systems are false and evil. The Islamic dogma must be accepted by all human beings, with their eternal lives or souls at stake. The unbeliever must accept the truth, and he must accept all of it. One who rejects the truth is in danger; according to the literal words of Islam, it is acceptable and even mandatory to put such a person to death.

Christianity and Judaism share the Abrahamic characteristics of Islam, but while they officially reject pluralist ideas, in practice they subscribe to pluralism. It is acceptable in Christian countries to practice other religions or to reject Christianity and religion altogether. While in theory such persons are supposed to be condemned by God for this, in practice few people really believe that agnostics are doomed to eternal hell. After long periods of self-criticism, both Christianity and Judaism have been reformed.

Islam, however, is unreformed. It rejects pluralism both in theory and in practice. It remains undiminished in its violent insistence upon the acceptance of its arbitrary dogmas. Its dogmas themselves are beyond question, critical inquiry, or reform. In short, it is characterized by an ignorant exclusivism that should not be dignified or excused under the banner of religion or philosophy. It belongs in a separate category from the great religions and philosophies of the world.

There is no better way of demonstrating this than to compare Islam’s founder and perfect model of behavior, Muhammad, to the world’s other great men. Next to men such as Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Socrates, Muhammad seems a distinctly unspiritual, violent, and hedonistic despot.

BUDDHA, CONFUCIUS, JESUS, SOCRATES, AND MUHAMMAD:
A COMPARISON
The great German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote a seminal work examining a group of men he called “the great philosophers.” Jaspers identified Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus as “paradigmatic” men who “by being what they were did more than other men to determine the history of man. Their influence extends through two millennia down to our own day.”30 From Jaspers’ analysis of these men it is easy to see how the religion Muhammad founded differs absolutely from the religious and philosophical traditions they founded.

Consider first the equanimity with which the four paradigmatic men approached life. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates spends hours of argument trying to convince some young men in Athens that justice is a virtue which should be practiced for its own sake, not just to get a good reputation. “Doing evil in retaliation for evil is not just,” Socrates said, and “neither injury nor retaliation nor warding off evil by evil is ever right.” Meanwhile, Buddha taught “the universal love which offers no resistance to the evildoer, suffers with infinite patience, and does good to all living things.” Confucius believed that one should face evil and suffering with quiet dignity. Jesus famously commanded his followers to love their enemies, to pray for them, and to turn the other cheek.31 Even while Jesus was being crucified, he prayed for his murderers: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”32

In comparison with such men, Muhammad seems petty and merciless. According to biographer Ibn Ishaq, when Muhammad found the mutilated body of his uncle on the battlefield of Uhud, he furiously responded, “If God gives me victory … I will mutilate thirty of their men.”33 When Mecca fell to Muhammad’s forces, he hunted down certain enemies from the past so that he could have them executed, leading early Islamic jurists to conclude that insulting Muhammad “was a crime so heinous that repentance was disallowed and summary execution was required.”34 It is this kind of behavior in Muhammad that is used to justify the rage modern Muslims exhibit, for example, over cartoons of Muhammad.

The four paradigmatic men devoted their lives to spiritual and intellectual development. Confucius, Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus “knew that they were speaking to the profound inwardness that precedes all action.”35 As a result, “where the influence of Socrates is felt, men convince themselves in freedom.”36 Meanwhile, as Jaspers observes, “an aura of gentleness lies over the peoples that have been touched by Buddhism.”37

By contrast, Muhammad’s focus was on the attainment of military and political power. He was a man of coercion rather than persuasion. When confronted with men who turned from Islam and murdered a shepherd, Muhammad’s response was to butcher and torture them:

He then ordered to cut their hands and feet [off] (and it was done), and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron. They were put in ‘Al-Harra’ and when they asked for water, no water was given to them.38

It is hard to imagine any one of the four paradigmatic men commanding such torture. Yet Muhammad’s actions established a pattern later Muslims regard as holy to follow. Where the four others reasoned peacefully, Muhammad demanded obedience and punished those who resisted or refused.

The Islamic calendar begins with Muhammad’s attainment of earthly power in Medina. Islam glories above all in its earthly conquests and judges its success and honor as a religion in terms of the territory it dominates. By contrast, the four paradigmatic men regarded material and political success with suspicion. Buddha exemplified “a life of indifference toward the world and its tasks.”39 Socrates humbly accepted the death sentence of his fellow Athenians and drank his hemlock without recrimination or protest. Jesus told Pontius Pilate while his life hung in the balance that “my kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting.”40

The wisdom of the paradigmatic four is conveyed also by their humility toward the past. Confucius “was cautious and reserved, yet not from fear, but from a sense of responsibility … he had an insatiable thirst for knowledge of antiquity.”41 Jesus’ teaching did not rest on his rejection and replacement of the Jewish scriptures, but on his mission to carry out and consummate them: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law of the Prophets,” he assured his hearers, “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”42 In contrast, Muhammad declared that his revelations from God would replace all previous revelations. Retroactively, all the great men of Judaism and Christianity were interpreted as “good Muslims.” Wherever Islam takes over, the cultural heritage is in danger as it was in Afghanistan, where all traces of the Buddhism and Hinduism that were part of the culture for centuries have been almost completely eradicated.

To this day, accepting the teaching of Muhammad is a matter of compulsion and submission. One must accept what Muhammad said; little or no thought is required. In stark contrast, Confucius, Socrates, Jesus, and Buddha all demand something more from their followers than mere obedience. Their example crosses cultural boundaries and commands respect from wise men of many cultures. During their lifetimes, not one of these men was engaged in violent compulsion, rape, and murder. Muhammad was guilty of them all.

The teachings of Jaspers’ four paradigmatic men are almost polar opposites of what Muhammad and the Qur’an teach. One cannot accept both, it is necessary to choose between them. Our universities have succumbed to a moral and cultural relativism (and to Arab oil wealth), allowing them to place Islam in a position equal to those of the four paradigmatic men. They should be subjecting Islam to critical examination, not excusing it for its failings. A simple comparison of the four men above with Muhammad and the Qur’an is sufficient to demonstrate the vast gulf separating Islam from the intellectual traditions of the non-Islamic world. The best and most moral men the world has produced are clearly superior to Muhammad, and the systems they inaugurated are superior to his system.

ISLAM IS NOT A RELIGION; MUHAMMAD WAS NOT A RELIGIOUS MAN

It should be clear thatthe creed Muhammad created, promulgated, and exemplified is violent, militaristic, and political. It is morally distinct from the paths taught by other great men of the past 2,000 years. Muhammad and his early followers behaved as his terrorist acolytes do today, using massacres and brutality as tactics to defeat the enemy and gain political power. The challenge Islam poses, therefore, is unique in its nature and its dangers.

One of the most noteworthy features of Islamic ethics is its dualistic nature. There is one set of standards and rules that applies to fellow believers and another set which applies when dealing with “infidels.” Notably, the infidel may be treated quite poorly—raped, killed, and robbed if necessary. Islam explicitly forbids its followers from making friends outside the faith. Even simply wishing a Christian “Merry Christmas” is not allowed. The literal words of Islam enforce an absolute separation between believer and infidel, and in both doctrine and practice Islam acts more like a political ideology than a religion.

Military historian Richard Gabriel, though deferential and keen to avoid offending Muslims, nevertheless concludes from Islam’s own records that Muhammad’s primary impact was as a general rather than a thinker or teacher. Muhammad’s military innovations were many and remarkable—and also evil. “It was Muhammad,” Gabriel explains, “who changed the traditional moral basis of Arab warfare, removing the traditional restraints on killing.”43 He did this by making the infrequent and temporary rules of the traditional Arab blood feud into a permanent state of conflict. This is essentially what the concept of jihad is: a traditional blood feud imposed on the division between Islamic believers and the mass of humanity that does not accept Islam. The rules of jihad allow killing and destroying the enemy without the inconvenience of social or moral disapproval. “Any rules of ethical behavior,” as Gabriel puts it, “applied only to the community of believers; those outside the ummah were held to possess no moral standing and could be killed or enslaved without consequences.”44

The result of this conceptual shift at the beginning of Islam was both horrifying and sadly familiar to the student of subsequent history and current events:

The idea of exterminating an entire town or a tribe was beyond the imagination of those engaged in a blood feud. Under Muhammad it became a common practice. Even murder became acceptable under the new rules.45

In the wars initiated and carried out by Muhammad there were more participants, more deaths, and more terror than before. What respect ought we feel for a man and a religion that represents “the elimination of the practical and ethical limits to warfare and violence undertaken against believers in the service of the faith”?46

In a 2014 speech, President Obama spoke out against ISIS for its massacre of civilians, saying the group’s actions were un-Islamic. Apparently the president or his speechwriters were unaware of the methods Muhammad used to gain momentum for his insurgency. Following his victory over the Quraysh tribe of Mecca at the Battle of Badr in 624, Muhammad “killed without mercy all the Meccan leaders that fell into his hands.”47 Ibn Ishaq records that one Muslim chopped off the foot of his son who had fought with the Quraysh in the battle, while other Muslims cut their prisoners “to pieces with their swords until they were dead.”48 It should be noted that the above information is known from Muslim accounts, and that the surviving version of these matters was purged by a Muslim editor who was reluctant to preserve “things which it is disgraceful to discuss” and “matters which would distress certain people.”49

The behavior after Badr was a model, not a singular event. In 627, Muhammad massacred the last surviving Jewish tribe in Medina, the Banu Qurayza. He ordered all the men to be beheaded in public (some 600 to 900 people) and their wives and children enslaved. Muhammad himself took one of the newly orphaned girls as a sex slave.50 If Muhammad did this, how can we call ISIS massacring civilians and enslaving girls un- Islamic?

Muhammad and his followers were able to go so far beyond the pale of normal respectability by hiding behind a metaphysical veneer. As other tyrants have done on a smaller scale, Muhammad tried to make his immorality into a new morality. What I do is right, he told the Muslims, because it is commanded by and in the service of Allah. For Muslims, what Muhammad did was right and remains right. ISIS and al-Qaeda and Boko Haram can be called cruel, barbaric, inhuman, but they cannot accurately be called un- Islamic.

Another characteristic non-religious innovation of Muhammad was the cultivation of a death fetish. In the early years of Islam, Muhammad and his forces were often outnumbered and surrounded by hostile peoples. They found success by taking a reckless approach, spurred on by the metaphysical promises Muhammad gave them of rewards in the afterlife. As Gabriel puts it, “Muhammad’s pronouncement that those killed in battle would be welcomed immediately into a paradise of pleasure and eternal life because they died fulfilling the command of God was a powerful inducement to perform well on the field of battle.”51 The Muslims were characterized not only by vicious contempt for the lives and families of their victims but also by a careless disregard of their own. This dynamic combination gave Islamic forces an advantage in battle that others in Arabia at the time could not match. This is Islam’s inhumane legacy.

Jihad, terrorism, and demographic conquest are Islam’s most significant contributions to the world. None of its supposed religious beliefs are spiritually significant, while some of its texts are even cribbed directly or indirectly from Judaic and Christian sources. As Christopher Hitchens wrote, “Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.”52

It is not a religion because it compels murder in its name. It is not a religion because it dismisses reflection and responds to criticism with intolerance and murder. It is not a religion because it threatens apostates with death. It is not a religion because it was founded by an illiterate whose primary contributions lay in the field of military brutality. Islam is not a religion, it is an evil empire. Islam, Hitchens aptly concludes, “makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or ‘surrender’ as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing— absolutely nothing—in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.”53

Terror is not the enemy. Terror is a technique used by the enemy. It is a technique used by those who want to enforce literal Islam. The people who want to do this are called by various names—jihadists, Islamists, Salafists, terrorists. But the people are not the problem. Muhammad is the one who divided the world into two eternally warring groups, believers and non-believers. Islam is the ideology of Muhammad, and Islamic imperialism is the source that spawns the terrorists who plague the world. Islamic imperialism itself is the problem. Islam is the enemy.

THE SIX STEPS OF ISLAMIC CONQUEST

Following the example and the dictates of Muhammad, Islam and its leaders have throughout its 1,400 years of existence sought to conquer and convert the world. They have not stopped short at anything, including slavery, rape, and genocide. Over the centuries, the methods of Islamic conquest have evolved into a predictable pattern of stages. Each step represents greater power for the Islamic overlords and a diminishing of the native culture, religions, and beliefs down to nothing or next to nothing. There are six steps to this imperialist conquest.

In the first step, Muslims appear in a targeted nation as immigrants or seemingly innocent practitioners of a separate but equal religion. At this stage their numbers are too few to make many demands other than to be left alone to practice their religion in peace and quiet. If such immigrants are accepted the door is open for development to stage two.

In the second step, the population of Muslims in the targeted nation has grown so that fewer and fewer feel the need to assimilate to the host culture to survive. Instead, they begin to form separate communities or enclaves and issue demands to be allowed to follow their own traditions, particularly sharia law, within those enclaves. Several European countries have now reached this stage. Their governments have failed to insist upon assimilation and as a result numerous independent Muslim areas have arisen in their cities where native citizens fear to go and sharia law is the de facto law of the land. This opens the door in turn to step three.

In the third step, the established and unassimilated enclaves of Muslims have grown in size to where they have political leverage. Muslims now make more and more demands of the surrounding society. They demand censure of all criticism of their religion and their way of life. The freer the host society the easier it is for the newcomers to use that society’s own laws to force compliance with these demands in the name of fairness and equal treatment. The Charlie Hebdo murders mentioned above demonstrate that France has reached this stage in Islamic conquest. As this stage gains momentum, lawsuits will be filed against any person or entity who opposes increased Islamization. This is already happening with members of France’s Front Nationale political party, which opposes Islamic immigration.

In the fourth step, Muslims will stage protests against individuals and organizations that resist the process of surrendering their cultural heritage. These protests may seem to be spontaneous and peaceful, but there will certainly be an undercurrent of threats. Over time, the demonstrations can easily become angry and violent, especially if the authorities attempt to control or restrict the protesters. Anyone arrested or detained during such events becomes a heroic victim in the eyes of the protesters.

In the fifth step, violence will be used. Opponents will be assassinated, often brutally. Resistance to Islamization is increasingly suppressed by creating a climate of fear. Weak political leaders will foolishly try to appease Muslims much as Neville Chamberlain did with Hitler in the years leading up to World War II.

In the sixth step, Muslims have become a significant part of the population of the host country. High birth rate plus mass immigration produces a displacement or replacement of the native population. Eventually, the native population becomes a minority in its own country, lacking the political or social power to resist. This is the point which most of the Middle East and much of Southern Asia and India have reached.

Once the demographic conquest of a nation has been achieved, its former political system is toppled and replaced by sharia law. The former culture of the nation is denigrated, destroyed, forgotten, and lost. Prior freedoms are gone. Remaining non-Muslims are killed, expelled, or enslaved. This may happen with greater or less rapidity but it is inevitable all the same. These six steps of Islamic conquest are a matter of historical record. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey were once Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and Orthodox Christian nations, respectively. Today, few remember their pre-Islamic past. The United States and Europe are being heated in the same frying pan; the sooner we jump out, the less likely we are to be cooked.

ISLAM: A GREATER THREAT THAN COMMUNISM AND NAZISM

As the example of Muhammad shows, and as this book has repeatedly argued, Islam is not a religion but an ideology of Arab supremacy. It is an imperialist ideology that commands its followers not only to obey but to expand and force others also to obey. This is particularly obvious when one considers how extensively Islam seeks to regulate and direct the lives of individuals under its control. As an imperialist ideology, Islam is infinitely more extensive, more dangerous, and more enduring than both Nazism and Communism combined.

Communism and Nazism both professed to reject Abrahamic monotheism, but both actually succumbed to the same mindset of monotheistic exclusivism. Following a convoluted notion of Aryans as the “master race” destined to rule and subjugate others, the Nazis engaged in wars of conquest and genocide. Communists thought that coercion and state tyranny could produce a classless society. Such utopian and infantile assumptions proved a disastrous failure in practice, destroying millions of lives.

Communism and Nazism today are obsolete. Hitler’s regime lasted only 15 years and did not outlive him. He left behind no children, no followers, and has no serious or influential heir. Nazism was simply a one-man show; it lacked a systematic metaphysics or a potent epistemology. The Communist Soviet Union lasted 70 years and was already moribund and failing at the time of its collapse. Neither Lenin nor Stalin produced an heir of significance, and their utopia is long dead. The Chinese have attained rapid economic growth through a gradual but steady rejection of Maoist ideology, embracing both technology and investments from the West as well as free market reforms.

If you compare the rational restraint that characterized the Soviet Union’s calculations even at the height of its power and antagonism toward the U.S. with America’s jihadist enemies, it is clear that Islam is far more dangerous than Communism. The Cold War was a contest between two Western political ideals. Despite many stark differences, certain mutually held fundamental moral imperatives could still be relied upon. The decades- long policy of deterrence followed by the Cold War superpowers worked because each side knew that the other sought to preserve human life and limit casualties. With Islamic imperialism, there is no such similarity of belief, and it never wearies of claiming that death is preferable to life.

Islam also offers a striking contrast to the Communist system, which at least allowed sufficient freedom of thought to foster scientific and technological advancements such as the launching of Sputnik in 1957. Nominally Communist nations like China and Vietnam and former Communist countries such as Russia are today formidable economic entities who have to varying degrees embraced market reforms. Islam does not allow such reform.

It is the ultimate totalitarian system, demanding complete submission of mind, body, and soul without question.

Unlike the Nazi or Communist threat, Islam adds the dimension of demographic conquest. Osama bin Laden has 24 children; King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has 45 children with some 30 or so wives. Even simple laboring folk like one Gulzar Khan of Pakistan get in on the act—Khan has 36 children despite having been displaced by sectarian violence.54 On a wider scale, Islam itself went from about 175 million followers in the 1880s to around 1.75 billion followers in 2015. This is a ten-fold increase in 135 years:

It is true that Islam has fewer professors than the others; according to one of the latest estimates, a hundred and seventy-five millions (of Muslims) against Christendom’s four hundred and Buddhism’s four hundred and fifty million or more.55

This report from 1881 shows that at one point Islam numbered fewer adherents than even Buddhism. The rapidity of its increase is a testimony to the reality of demographic conquest.

By contrast, Hitler had no children and three childless brothers on Long Island represent the last surviving remnants of his extended family. Stalin’s last surviving child, known as Lana Peters, died poor and nearly unknown. Neither Nazi Germany nor the Soviet Union ever presented a demographic threat to the survival of the West. Islam does. By having children in such massive numbers, Islam threatens to displace the cultures of the West, which have all fallen to replacement-level or sub-replacement-level fertility rates. This level of demographic replacement represents a threat from which recovery is impossible. Economic bankruptcy can be overcome; cultural bankruptcy means destruction.

All sense of humanity and decency is swept aside by Islamic imperialists, who for 1,400 years have maintained that either destruction or submission is the destiny of all non-Muslims. It is clear that if Nazism and Communism were accepted as threats to the free world, Islam must necessarily be seen as an infinitely more potent enemy. The West, led by the United States, was able to reason with the Soviet Union and its allies on the basis of shared Western values for peaceful co-existence. With Islam, discussions, debates, and agreements are impossible because Islam explicitly rejects reason and empiricism. In Islam, theology (the Qur’an and sharia) are the only true guides and all else must be rejected. This means that we are now faced with implacable mass-murderers who cannot be deterred from their agenda of genocide and total supremacy. Rather than opponents who at least valued the lives of their family and compatriots, we have those who voraciously sacrifice their own wives and children for their bloody cause.

Western leaders today want to suggest that Russian leader Vladimir Putin somehow represents a threat that must be addressed. Some publications go so far as to compare his actions in Crimea and the Ukraine with those of Adolph Hitler in the years leading up to World War II. The absurdity of such comparisons may be demonstrated by the fact that, in order to oppose Putin, the West is now supporting actual Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine who oppose Russia.56 Putin’s Russia is no threat to the West—they have no claims on Western nations, they do not fund or direct terrorists to attach Western targets, and they are not engaged in an ongoing process of demographic replacement. Islam has announced its hostility to the West; it kills Westerners routinely through terror attacks; it is engaged in steady demographic conquest of Western nations (as this book, and others, have amply documented). Far from being an opponent of the West, Putin is a potential ally: Russia has the same problem with Islam and Islamic terror within its borders. It is time for the world to recognize a true threat and get serious about its opposition to Islam.

IDENTIFYING PROBLEMS AND 21ST CENTURY SOLUTIONS

What would it look like if the non-Islamic world got serious about taking on, containing, and defeating the threat of Islam and its imperialistic and genocidal hatred? If the world realized that Islam was not another religion but a threat to all religions and to freedom of thought everywhere, what would the response be? This book has suggested many policy changes that must be part of a comprehensive solution, but let us consider here a range of actions that could be taken across economic, military, political, demographic, geopolitical, and philosophical spheres.

The principles of Islamic imperialism and bigotry would not have spread so widely over the past 70 years if not for Saudi oil money. The Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia have used their petrodollars to grease the mechanism of hatred for a long time, and the oil-thirsty West has largely looked the other way as they did so. The West’s addiction to oil may well be leading it to commit suicide.

What makes this situation particularly galling is that the price of oil has been largely controlled by an Arab Muslim-dominated cartel to the detriment of the rest of the world, despite the fact that it was European and American explorations which first discovered and tapped the Middle East oil reserves. On top of that, the oil was of no use to the Muslims until the West required it to fund the machinery of its modern technology. Left to their own devices, the Muslims of Arabia would scarcely have needed or even found the oil beneath them and would have remained in the poverty to which they had been subject for centuries. How long will the West permit its own advances and its own funds to be directed against its own interests?

It is time to press home the obvious fact that Arab oil exporters are as dependent on the oil-importing nations of the world as we are on them. The oil-importing countries can and should form an alliance to offset and overwhelm the collective power of OPEC. Such an alliance could force oil exporters to sell their product at a fair market rate. Although at the time of writing oil prices are falling around the world, this is only happening with the Saudis’ acquiescence. If the Saudis wish to reduce oil production in order to push prices back up, they are more than able to do so to the world’s detriment.

Getting serious about confronting this unacceptable dependence means we must take drastic measures. The non-Muslim world should continue to move forward with policies of energy conservation, alternative fuel sources, and the exploitation of new sources of oil. Imports of oil from countries ruled by Islamic fundamentalists should be cut off. Let the Saudis feel what it is like to be put over an economic barrel; they need water and food from the rest of the world more than the rest of the world needs their oil. This need can and should be used as a weapon in the economic war against Islamic imperialism.

If the United States can lead the nations of the world in ending the Arab dominance of the world oil market, it can also end its own long history of supporting Islamic supremacists who have used American protection and American money to kill Americans. Once America’s poisonous pseudo-alliances with the likes of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are repudiated, those countries can be seen as what they are: part of an Axis of Jihad. These countries are not to be appeased; they should be demilitarized, democratized, and secularized. Together with Iran, which represents the Shia sect of Islam, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are part of this Axis, which perpetuates and expands Islam in its most intolerant and virulent form.

The opposition to Islam must also be carried out with thought as well as force of arms. The ideology of Islamic imperialism must be opposed. The absurdities of Muhammad’s teaching must be exposed. During the European Enlightenment, the logical absurdities and historical inaccuracies of the Bible were exposed by critical thought and scientific examination. Christianity and Judaism underwent a period of reform in the light of these examinations. The same process can and must be applied to Islam. To that end, the forces of secular humanism, critical thought, and scientific inquiry must be exported to and supported within the Islamic nations of the world. Literal Islam cannot withstand such scrutiny because it rests upon fairy tales like Muhammad’s midnight horse ride to heaven and Jerusalem and disguises cruelty and genocide (such as the extermination of the Banu Qurayza tribe) beneath a veneer of “religious” justification.

PRESIDENT OBAMA AND THE FAILURE TO NAME THE ENEMY

In mid-February of 2015, the White House hosted a three-day summit on “Countering Violent Extremism.” People representing more than 60 different countries attended, including Muslim leaders based in the United States, the Mayor of Paris, the Director of the Russian Federal Security Service (their equivalent of the FBI), and other foreign officials. Oddly, despite the presence of his Russian counterpart, Director of the FBI James Come was not invited. The conference opened with an Islamic prayer by Imam Sheikh Sa’ad Musse Robel from Minneapolis, Minnesota. No other faith was represented.

In connection with this summit, President Barack Obama penned an op-ed on the topic. The op-ed correctly notes that “military force alone cannot solve this problem.” Unfortunately, it betrays a shallow and confused notion of what the nature of “this problem” is. President Obama continues to peddle the line that the issue is one of “violent extremism,” that “Groups like al Qaeda and ISIL promote a twisted interpretation of religion,” and that Islamic terrorists “betray Islam.”57

This is a common line in Muslim apologist rhetoric—when Muslims do something horrible in the name of Islam, simply declare that they do not represent Islam. Unfortunately for the President, it is profoundly misleading to do this. Global jihadists are dutifully following the teaching and examples of Muhammad, the founding Prophet of Islam. His words and deeds are well enshrined in the Qur’an and the Hadith texts. During his lifetime, Muhammad had his critics assassinated, beheaded opponents, and committed genocide against tribes who refused to surrender to Islam. He was personally involved in nearly 100 military campaigns that resulted in the deaths of thousands. He and his forces took women and children as slaves, and Islamic holy texts record the proper distribution of such booty. What groups like ISIS do may be called evil, cruel, barbarous, and savage—but it cannot be called un-Islamic. Their actions are part of the fabric of what Islam has been since its beginning. Our fight is not against some vague extremism—it is against extremism of a very particular Islamic kind.

Despite the culture of denial and apology for Islam, there are credible counter-voices raised in the media. In a thorough and nuanced article in the Atlantic, journalist Graeme Wood points out that contrary to persistent denials by Muslim scholars and academic apologists in the West, ISIS sees itself as “the agents of the … apocalypse” as described in the Qur’an. All the activities ISIS has engaged in are sanctioned and encouraged by the sacred writings of Islam, and this has been agreed upon by Muslim clerics through the ages.58 Meanwhile, feminist journalists Asra Q. Noumani and Hala Arafa point out in The Daily Beast that “the Islamic State, al Qaeda and the alphabet soup of Islamic groups … rely very much on the scholarship of ‘religious leaders’ from Ibn Tamiyyah in the 14th century to Sayyid Qutb in the 20th century, who have credibility and authority among too many Muslims.”59 While President Obama may wish to avoid saying so, Noumani and Arafa honestly declare “we are at war with an ideology and theology of Islam.”60

President Obama goes on to say that “al Qaeda and ISIL peddl[e] the lie that the United States is at war with Islam.”61 He is correct; the United States is not at war with Islam. But what he fails to admit is that Islam is most certainly at war with the United States—and with all non-Islamic civilizations. This war is one of Islam’s founding principles. It has been in perpetual conflict with non-Islamic civilizations for 1,400 years, and its current goals are to destroy Western Civilization as it destroyed the Hindu, Buddhist, Persian, Coptic, and Hellenic civilizations.

The United States is founded in and promotes freedom. This can be seen in the Preamble to our Constitution, which declares that the people of the United States “do ordain and establish this Constitution.” The assumption is that the people are sovereign and may decide for themselves what form of government to establish. This founding document makes clear that certain rights belong to human beings inalienably and outlines limits to the federal government’s power over its citizens. Not only are the people free to form a government suitable for them, they are free also to change how that government operates. The Constitution contains provisions for amendment and alteration as may become necessary.

These assumptions are completely anathema to Islam, which holds that Allah, not the people, is sovereign: “Allah knows and you do not know,” as the Qur’an repeatedly states. Islam wants to destroy the Constitution and replace it with the Qur’an and sharia law. The Qur’an in Islam is not like the Bible in Christianity—it is a political document which declares Islam to be the supreme law and guidance for life. Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries declare that it is their Constitution. Islam has no Bill of Rights, but it has rules for the enslavement of non-Islamic peoples and the treatment of non-Islamic religions. It mandates unequal treatment for both. Unlike the Constitution, the Qur’an is uncontestable and inalterable. It is divine law, perfect and valid for all people and all times. Far from accepting that people may govern themselves, Islam declares that they must follow its rules and anyone who refuses to surrender and convert must be taxed, demeaned, imprisoned, or killed.

In the light of these facts, what are we to make of President Obama’s claim that “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” How can it be part of the President’s responsibility to defend a religion that seeks to destroy the Constitution he is sworn to uphold? President Obama has a long track record of praising Islam, the dominant religion where he spent his early years in Indonesia. “The sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer,” he told a receptive crowd in Cairo. He has also on several occasions praised what he calls Islam’s “proud tradition of tolerance” and announced that, “Islam has always been part of America.” Such comments suggest that the President is ill informed as to the nature both of Islam and of America. Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States of America is the most eloquent apologist for Islamic supremacy in the world today.

In order to win a permanent and lasting war against Islamic imperialism we must not view our enemy as an abstraction, and we cannot act as apologists for their ideology. After $4.4 trillion dollars and 10,000 lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, we cannot afford any longer to offer praise and support to the very people who want to destroy us. We must openly and clearly name our enemies. President Obama, the Muslim apologist, will not do it. That enemy is global Islamic jihad, and its leaders are Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and non- state actors such as ISIS, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram. Naming our enemy is the first step toward solving the problem.

AN ENEMY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

Iran is one of the principal states seeking to establish a global Islamic empire. Unlike Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Iran is quite public about its ambitions. This publicity is necessary because as a Shia state Iran is regarded with suspicion by most of the Muslim world. Therefore, Iran preens itself before the Muslim community for its open defiance of Israel and the United States and for its support for terrorism.

This support has been increasing in recent years. As expert Dr. Matthew Levitt told the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, “Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism has increased dramatically to levels not seen since the late 1980s and early 1990s.”62 Iran is well known as a crucial supporter of both Hamas and Hezbollah, who between them have ensured the ongoing failure of the Middle East peace process. The Iranian regime also has its own terror force operating under the aegis of its Revolutionary Guard. They are sent to sow chaos from Afghanistan to Yemen.63

At the same time, Iran is a special case in the Axis of Jihad because it is not an Arab country. The people of Iran are Persians and still retain pride in and respect for their own cultural past. Despite being conquered by Arabs centuries ago, the Persian people do not respect Arab culture or civilization. Their version of Islam has a decidedly different flavor.

More importantly, it is only the regime of Iran that is part of the Axis of Jihad. The people of Iran themselves are not interested in theocratic Islam. Most Iranians alive today were born after the 1979 revolution. While they have no memory of the excesses of the Shah, they are very familiar with the failed promises of the Islamic Revolution and its ignorant clerical tyrants who repress the people. The world should continue to isolate this regime while supporting the forces of reform and secularism within Iran. There is no need for invasion or attack.

The U.S. also shouldn’t fall into the trap of making the Iranian regime an ally against ISIS. This would only ensure the clerics’ survival for another generation. Iranian human rights leader Maryam Rajavi has called it “naïve and dangerous” to imagine that collaborating with Iran could bring peace. “Tehran and the Islamic state group,” she explains, “complement and strengthen each other—ideologically as well as tactically on the field of battle.”64 Elsewhere, she called Iran’s participation in the fight against ISIS “a hundred times more dangerous than any form of Islamic fundamentalism,” since such participation would give the regime cover to go on the offensive against other countries in the region.65 Rajavi is precisely the sort of person the U.S. and its allies should be supporting in Iran. She is a secularist and a nationalist who leads a major political resistance movement that opposes the theocratic regime. Rajavi’s movement has a ten-point plan for Iran that emphasizes free elections, political pluralism, separation of church and state, and equality for women. While still a Muslim, Rajavi is careful to distance herself from those she calls “Islamic fundamentalists” and advocates a region-wide approach that emphasizes Iranian regime change in concert with the fight against ISIS.66

The provisional agreement that western nations naively signed with Iran has not changed either the Irania regime’s apocalyptic view of its Islamic role or its determination to gain nuclear weapons. Speaking recently to the Iranian parliament in defense of Iran’s pursuit of such weapons, Ayatollah Khamenei asserted that “battle and jihad are endless because evil and its front continue to exist.” Rambling on, Khamenei also insisted that “this battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it, which has expanded its claws on human mind, body, and thought.”67

Therefore, the solution for Iran is regime change. The popular opposition to heavy- handed theocratic rule should be encouraged. The youth of Iran are showing profound interest in their pre-Islamic heritage and Zoroastrian religion. If Iran could be restored as a secular nation it would become a beacon of light to the whole region.

NUCLEAR PAKISTAN: AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO THE WEST AND INDIA

In mid-December 2014 Pakistan suffered the deadliest terror attack in its history. Seven Islamists attacked an Army Public School in Peshawar, killing 145 people, 132 of them children between eight and 18 years of age. Sadly, this is not unsurprising from a country at war with itself, its heritage, and its own nature. The Pakistani people retain a Hindu soul but follow a foreign Arabic creed that produces a reaction one can only call schizophrenia. Since India’s independence and the partition that created the Pakistani state the country has repeatedly gone down the road toward greater and greater Islamism—with predictably tragic results. The ideology of the Peshawar attackers is not an aberration it is the direct result of the Pakistani state’s very own jihadist modus operandi, now spun out of control.

Pakistan’s Islamization had deadly consequences for its neighbors and for the world long before the country itself came to reap the whirlwind. The Pakistani Army has long inculcated its soldiers in the jihadist ethos, most visibly in the famous book The Quranic Concept of War which former Pakistani leader General Zia ul-Haq made mandatory reading for army officers. Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has for decades trained, developed, taught, and made use of jihadist fighters to further the country’s political aims. Kashmir, India, Bengal, and Afghanistan all bear witness to the ISI’s jihadist meddling.

Revealingly, Pakistan has continued its support for jihad despite ostensibly joining America’s War on Terror after 9/11. New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall offers the most recent exposé of this continued policy in her aptly titled book, The Wrong Enemy. In this book, Gall details how Afghan Taliban leaders were sheltered by Pakistan after 9/11 and even reformed, reorganized, and sent back into battle at the instigation of the ISI—sometimes even against their will. The Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, which was a source of grave sorrow to the U.S. and its allies, was essentially a creation of Pakistani policy. Pakistan pulled off this duplicitous act while continuing to collect taxpayer dollars from the United States as a purported ally.68

For example, in 2006 when a wave of suicide attacks spread carnage across Afghanistan, “Afghan investigators soon discovered that the suicide bombings and the networks supplying them were emanating from Pakistan.”69 In 2008, a suicide bombing at India’s Kabul embassy killed 50 people. As Gall reveals, “American and Afghan surveillance intercepted phone calls from ISI officials in Pakistan and heard them planning the attack with the militants in Kabul in the days leading up to the bombing.”70 In short, the atrocity was sanctioned and monitored by the most senior officials in Pakistani intelligence.

Pakistani officials claim they are good allies in the War on Terror, pointing to arrests of Afghan Taliban leaders. What they do not advertise is how often they arrested these Taliban leaders to prevent them from making peace deals with the Americans. At times, they have gone so far as to kill people in detention they feared were likely to make peace, as they did with Taliban Defense Minister Mullah Obaidullah. They did the same in 2009, preventing Afghani President Mohammed Karzai from speaking with several dozen Taliban leaders they held in custody.71

Compared to the flimsy rationale used to justify the invasion of Iraq, the accumulation of Pakistan’s crimes against America is overwhelming. America has been fighting the Taliban tail in Afghanistan while petting and feeding the dog in Pakistan. Yet despite the evidence American support for Pakistan continues. Between 2001 and 2013, the U.S. provided some 26 billion USD in assistance to Pakistan.72 As an exasperated former Pakistani legislator told Gall, the U.S. is “standing by a military that protects, aids, and abets people who are going against the U.S. and the Western mission in Afghanistan, in Syria, everywhere.”73

PAKISTAN AS A CASE OF MENTAL ILLNESS

The problem of Pakistan demands a deeper explanation because its behavior exhibits nothing less than the symptoms of collective psychosis. In its jihadist crusade against its ancestral culture and race, the Muslims of Pakistan have sought to Arabize themselves to such a degree that they have induced a virtual dissociation psychosis. With this misguided zeal to become truly Muslim and eradicate their Hindu roots, they have developed a schizophrenic self-loathing from their failure to do so. In rational terms, Pakistan’s attempt at self-Arabization is nothing less than a fantasy sustained by a perverse will to believe. In more general terms this is the generic mental illness of Islam, a religion likewise sustained on pure irrational will to believe.

The failure of attaining the utopian ideal envisioned by Pakistan’s ideological founders, especially Mohammed Iqbal, can be seen in the complete betrayal of Pakistan’s founding belief of becoming a state that unites all Muslims in amity and concord. Even among Muslim nations, Pakistan is notably riven with divisions and internecine violence. It stands out for its extreme examples of intra-faith conflict and genocide. It is a state in which all but the most fanatical Sunni Muslims are targeted as non-Muslims, apostates, and infidels and subjected to oppression and murder.

In every sense of the term Pakistan today is a failed state that only continues to exist because it is propped up by more powerful governments who fail to recognize the pathology at work. Pakistan’s problem, despite its leaders’ rhetoric, is not extremism or the Hindus of India, or even terrorism per se. Its problem is Islam. The only nation in the world founded explicitly as a Muslim nation is completely unable to function without outside financial assistance—and even then it could not control the jihadists who use its territory even if it wanted to.

As Pakistan is a failed state, it must be invaded and subsequently demilitarized, democratized, and secularized. Its military should not be allowed to threaten its neighbors, its nuclear weapons cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of jihadists, and its ISI cannot be allowed to continue to develop terrorists as a matter of national policy. However, Pakistan’s failure also offers a unique problem. What could or would replace Islam in Pakistan if this ideology were abandoned?

There seem to be two viable alternatives for Pakistan. One would be a return to its ancient Buddhist heritage. A nontheistic religious system that champions reason and rejects theological dogma, Buddhism was actually the dominant religion for centuries in most of the area which today comprises Pakistan. The other alternative is modernization, meaning the embrace of secularism, science, and critical thought. This alternative would require a revolution in consciousness, but the end result would bring the greatest benefit. In a nation informed by the choice of reason and science over theology, Islam would be unable to survive as a significant force.

SAUDI ARABIA: RELIGIOUS SUPERPOWER AND ENEMY OF THE WEST

Like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia has long been playing a double game with the West. With one hand it offers mostly token gestures of opposition to jihadism while with the other it offers global jihadists the financial backing they need to carry out their campaign of destruction. Using their enormous oil wealth, the Saudis promote the spread of their own literal and conservative brand of Islam called Wahhabism. Without Saudi money, a large proportion of the mosques, madrasas, Islamic charities, media outlets, and terror groups around the world that promote literalist Islam would not even exist. Whatever its government may officially do or not do, Saudi Arabia is at the epicenter of the spread of Islamic imperialism and therefore constitutes a major threat to the world.

The Saudis hide their support for terrorism behind the façade of charitable donations. This is not speculation; it is a fact. In 2002, a report from the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that “for years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been the most important source of funds for al Qaeda. And for years, Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to this problem.”74 One of the lawyers engaged in a suit against the Saudi government for complicity in 9/11 asserts that these purported charities “served as the primary sources of funding and logistical support for Al Qaeda for more than a decade leading up to the 9/11 attacks.”75

Recently, al-Qaeda member and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui has accused Saudi Arabia and members of its royal family of being patrons of al-Qaeda. Moussaoui says there was a connection between the Kingdom and the 9/11 attacks, and that funding for his organization came from several Saudi princes.76 Saudi Arabia has dismissed these claims on the grounds that Moussaoui is insane, but this is belied by the facts, given that Moussaoui was accepted as mentally competent to stand trial and even to represent himself in court. Former U.S. Senator and 9/11 Commission Report member Bob Kerrey has suggested that Moussaoui’s claims have not been fully investigated perhaps because the U.S. is unwilling to antagonize its alleged ally. “But that is no excuse,” he says, “to sweep these charges under the rug.”77

The problem is that the United States has become something of a “Saudi Occupied Government” over the years. Nothing illustrates this quite so well as the American response to the death of Saudi King Abdullah in January 2015. The death of former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was greeted with only a minor delegation of retired politicians and former officials. President Obama did not attend her funeral, nor did any other serving politician. Yet Thatcher was a long-time leader of one of America’s closest allies.78 When King Abdullah died, President Obama himself, who “rarely travels overseas to mark the death of a foreign leader,” attended the funeral along with several top current officials.79 It is a mark of Saudi Arabia’s outsized influence that the death of its dictator should be treated with respect and accusations of its being involved in a conspiracy to conduct an unprecedented attack on the United States should be received in silence. This is an odd situation, to say the least, for the world’s premiere jihad nation to be in.

Saudi Arabia’s prominence as a jihad nation rests on two things: oil money and the guardianship of the two holiest sites in Islam. Therefore, the solution to the problem of Saudi Arabia consists first in removing these two supports. As discussed above, a boycott of Saudi oil combined with increased moves toward energy independence would go a long way to removing the first. Countries such as Russia, Venezuela, and the United States have significant oil reserves and well developed industries for accessing them, while dependence on Saudi oil is not as great as it used to be. Another potential approach is to move forward with pending lawsuits against Saudi Arabia for its role in promoting jihad. Victims of terrorist attacks in America are already seeking what could be billions or even trillions of dollars in compensation. If successful, such suits could go a long way toward bankrupting this jihadist regime forever. Regarding the second support, control of Mecca and Medina should be given to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (which represents 57 Muslim states). This solution would be welcomed by the majority of the world’s Muslims, many of whom are resentful of high-handed dealing at the hands of Saudi managers of these sites. If Islam is truly a universal religion as it claims to be, let a multinational organization of Islamic countries handle the affairs of the holy sites in Mecca and Medina.

In addition, as a sponsor of jihad Saudi Arabia should be ostracized and isolated from the community of civilized nations. Immigration from Saudi Arabia should be severely restricted, and many Saudis currently living abroad should be repatriated. Jihadist preachers in the West should likewise be deported to Saudi Arabia. The reason for this is quite simple: since all jihadists subscribe to a Saudi supremacist ideology, it makes sense to deport them to the country they operate on behalf of, regardless of current or original nationality. As much as possible, Saudi Arabia should be demilitarized, democratized, and secularized. Its military forces cannot be permitted any offensive capability but should be downgraded to the status of police forces with the downgrade enforced by treaties and a regime of inspections and sanctions. This policy worked against Hussein’s Iraq and could work even better against Saudi Arabia, whose military is even more radically dependent upon the U.S. for training and materiel.

Furthermore, Saudi Arabia should no longer be permitted to take advantage of its migrant worker population. No other country on earth is allowed to treat foreign workers as poorly as the Saudis have done. This book has already documented the many abuses and as a matter of record Indonesia has gone so far as to issue a ban on its citizens going to work there due to the large number of human rights complaints and abuses. Existing migrant workers within Saudi borders could be given permanent residency or citizenship, which they are currently denied. Since they are the ones who built modern Saudi Arabia, this is a just demand. If Islam can have mosques in Rome, Paris, London, and New York, why can the world have no houses of non-Islamic worship in Saudi Arabia? The world holds enormous leverage over Saudi Arabia, which is completely dependent upon foreign workers and imports of food and water and medicine. The world can use food, water, and medicine—as well as threats to national security—as bargaining tools in negotiating with Saudi Arabia.

Fortunately, there are forces within Saudi Arabia that oppose the harsh theocratic regime which oppresses its people. One of the most touching examples comes within the royal family itself, in the persons of four daughters of the recently departed King Abdullah. The four princesses (Sahar, Maha, Hala, and Jawaher Al Saud) have all been outspoken proponents of women’s rights in the Kingdom. As a reward, for 13 years they “have been confined in pairs, isolated from outside contact—beaten, drugged, deprived of food and water for periods of time, slowly starved, and [sic] subjected to heat without air-conditioning in the desert clime.”80 Another example is blogger Raif Badawi, who was charged with apostasy (a crime punishable by death) for “Liking” a Facebook page for Arab Christians and sentenced to 1,000 lashes for criticizing the religious leaders of Saudi Arabia on his blog. As of this writing, Badawi is in danger of being executed on the charge of apostasy.81 Badawi and the Saudi princesses represent forces of hope in the country—they dare to speak out against the harsh Islamic regime, despite the threat to their freedoms, their persons, and their lives.

NAMING THE ENEMY: NON-STATE ACTORS ISIS, BOKO HARAM, THE TALIBAN

Nothing illustrates the failed approach of Western leaders to Islam as well as President Barack Obama’s response to this latest manifestation of jihad and Islamic imperialism. Speaking a day before the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the President announced a new round of military actions aimed at defeating the new threat from ISIS. Referring to the group as ISIL (with an ‘L’ for the Levant), Obama ludicrously claimed that “ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.”82 The problem with this claim is that in the eyes of ISIS and its supporters and well-wishers the victims of this group are not innocent or even Muslims at all. It also ignores the basic facts of Islam’s history, which have been well documented in this book. The killing of non-believers is not only condoned by Islam, it is encouraged repeatedly in its holiest texts as a righteous act.

In truth, ISIS is unimpeachably Islamic. Its declarations and actions are all fully justifiable using the literal words of the Islamic triad of scriptures. This group is consciously and directly imitating the example provided by the Prophet Muhammad, who likewise struggled to establish his religion—the true religion, in their eyes—despite being surrounded by pagans and nonbelievers. Whole tribes were killed as part of the Prophet’s struggle, while Muhammad’s successors expanded that example into large-scale genocide. Whatever ISIS may be, it cannot factually be called “un-Islamic.”

We cannot understand or defeat ISIS if we insist on regarding it as something separate from Islam, as an aberration or an extreme. It is in fact an integral part of the worldwide Sunni revolution of which the events in the so-called Arab Spring are one prominent facet. With ISIS it is clear that the world is witnessing not an Arab Spring but a Sunni Winter.

In the late 2000s, Syria became only the latest battleground in this global Sunni revolution. The Syrian conflict pits majority-Sunni rebel groups against government forces led by the Alawites (a Muslim minority sect to which Syrian president Bashar al Assad and his family belong; the Sunni fundamentalists regard them as non-Muslims). As of 2014, the deaths in this civil war topped 200,000 with more than six million people displaced by the violence. ISIS began as one of several Sunni terror groups that fought with Assad, then gained power and influence by spilling over the porous border with Iraq to oppose the shaky Shia government there.

As mentioned above, ISIS has declared itself a new caliphate. This is truly the aim of many of the major radical players in the Islamic world—the claim to be the political and religious leader of the worldwide Islamic community. With nothing to lose, ISIS can afford to be bold and public in its declarations. The spectacle of beheadings and ethnic cleansing which ISIS has presented to the world are actually part of its jihadist bona fides. Muhammad and his successors who formed the first caliphate did the same thing, cleansing the Arabian Peninsula of all non-Muslims then turning their sights on the expansion of the Islamic empire. Today, ISIS is trying to wipe out the wrong kinds of Muslims from lands it controls. Tomorrow, it hopes to expand just as the first caliphs did. This is the jihadist dream, and it comes from the example of Muhammad and the caliphs who built the first Islamic empire.

ISIS cannot be opposed simply by bombs from above. The ideology which produced it must be discredited and discarded. The flimsy protection of “religious freedom” used to defend it in Western countries must be exposed. The values of critical thought and scientific method must be championed vigorously in opposition. In short, ISIS must be defeated on the battlefield of ideas as well as on the battlefield of armies.

But even as ISIS captures the headlines, similar groups with identical Islamic inspiration also wreak havoc around the world. One of the most despicable examples is Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. In 2014, this group followed Muhammad’s example when it kidnapped and enslaved 276 Nigerian schoolgirls in Chibok. People in the West thought hashtags and token gestures were an appropriate response. And even as the world’s attention was riveted on the awful Paris massacres and their aftermath in January 2015, Boko Haram reportedly massacred 2,000 people in the northeastern Nigerian town of Baga and burned down the town.83

All these non-state actors have one thing in common: their Islamic ideology. While they may not always cooperate due to being rivals for prestige, money, and power, their goals are always the same. They want the universal conquest of the world by Islam and the imposition of sharia law. ISIS, Boko Haram, the Taliban and others are all unimpeachably Islamic. They follow the example of Muhammad, the laws of sharia, and the dictates of the Qur’an quite literally. The fact that they are carrying out mass murder and sexual slavery does not make them un-Islamic; instead, it demonstrates the evils of the Islamic ideology that guides them. These true followers of Muhammad, sharia, and the Qur’an represent yet another front in the war between world civilization and Islam—a war that Islam itself started and continues to perpetuate. All such entities must be militarily destroyed.

NAMING THE ENEMY: THE GULF COOPERATION COUNCIL (GCC)

Everything said about Saudi Arabia can be extended to the GCC as a whole. This wealthy consortium of petty kingdoms and emirates is almost completely reliant on non-Arab migrant labor. In the United Arab Emirates, some 95 percent of the working population is foreign. Yet these workers are often treated like slaves—abused, degraded, detained, endangered, and even raped. Domestic workers are in a precarious position since they are often not even covered by labor laws, leaving them completely at the whim of their employers. Few in the West realize how dependent these Arab states are on a system that is slavery in all but name.

In Qatar, 1.38 million foreign laborers make up 94 percent of the workforce. Yet a recent Amnesty International report uncovered routine abuse and mistreatment of these workers on a wide scale. The abuse includes: [Workers] having their pay withheld for months, or not being paid at all … having their passports confiscated and being prevented from leaving the country by their employers … being made to work excessive (sometimes extreme) hours … [and] being housed in squalid accommodation.84

Investigations by Britain’s Guardian newspaper found nearly 500 Indian workers had died in Qatar in 2012 and 2013 with 24 more deaths reported as of January 2014. Nearly 400 Nepalese workers died over the same period, with a large number of these attributed to heart failure or workplace accidents. “Workers described forced labour in 50C heat, [and] employers who retain salaries for several months,” the paper revealed.85

At the heart of the Islamic world, GCC states are controlled by decadent oligarchs who degrade and exploit workers from poorer countries, including their fellow Muslims. This hypocrisy goes mostly unmentioned. It is time for these states to be held to the same standard as the rest of the world. Systemic mistreatment should not be tolerated, especially from countries that are among the richest in the world. As with Saudi Arabia, the GCC should be pressured into reforming its labor system and forced to provide permanent resident and citizenship to some of those whom it has exploited.

Given the parasitical nature of the economies of the GCC nations there is great potential here. Their utter dependence on petrodollars gives importing countries leverage. The U.S. and its allies should decide whether they will continue to prop up these barbaric regimes or use some of their leverage to advocate for significant change. Citizenship for migrant workers would go a long way to denuding the GCC of its Arab tyranny. Enforcing secular democracy in the GCC should be the price the world charges for allowing them continued access to the global oil market and American military protection.

THE HOAX OF THE UMMAH

As the systematic degradation perpetrated by Arabs on their fellow Muslims illustrates, the ummah, or worldwide community of Muslims, is a crucial hoax used to shield Islam from criticism. Apologists for Islam will point to places like Indonesia and say, “See, this is a relatively normal Islamic country. Islam cannot be so bad after all.” This is a foolish line of reasoning. The relative stability and functionality of such parts of the “Muslim world” have nothing to do with Islam; it is due to the pre-Islamic culture of these (Hindu and Buddhist, in the case of Indonesia) lands. Furthermore, the Indonesian and other non- Arab Muslims are typically treated as second-class citizens in the Arab world. There is a clear hierarchy in Islam with Arab Muslims at the top.

The non-Arab Muslim world is composed almost entirely of coerced converts to Islam and their descendants. Muslims in the Balkans, for example, were converted by the conquests of the Ottoman Empire. Sunni Arabs do not regard them as Muslims with the same status as themselves. Saudi Arabia and the wealthy Arabs of the Gulf Cooperation Council are having it both ways here. On the one hand they call Indonesia or Bangladesh part of the ummah and count their Muslims as part of the world total, yet at the same time they treat them as slaves and abuse them when they come to work in their countries. Muslims in Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and all of South Asia are in quasi- slavery. Arab employers usually confiscate the passports of their foreign workers upon arrival.

In recent years, thanks to the increasing influence of Saudi-financed Islamic teaching, non-Arab Muslim countries have been increasingly Arabized. Islam in these countries has become stricter and more literal in its application. Consequently, the Muslims in these countries have grown to be increasingly at odds with their native civilizational heritage and more hostile to non-Muslims and other Muslims regarded as insufficiently pious. Muslims in countries such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Burma are expected to reject their Hindu-Buddhist heritage in favor of a fanatical jihadist mindset. The Buddhist majority has resisted these efforts so far, leading to civil conflict.

The solution for non-Arab Muslim countries is the same as for the rest of the “Muslim world.” It is a return to pre-Islamic roots and an embrace of ancestral civilizational values. The leaders of these countries should shake off the spell of Islamic indoctrination and realize that their future should not be a regression to a primitive, reactionary, and unscientific worldview. Indonesia is starting to turn away from Saudi influence due to the mistreatment of their citizens in Saudi Arabia. Such turnings should be encouraged and hastened wherever possible.

In the end, the hoax of the ummah is that the vast majority of Muslims receive no benefits from their adherence to Islamic ideology. Perhaps 5 percent of Muslims, the so- called Syeds who are members of Muhammad’s bloodline, receive tangible and significant benefits from it. They constitute a de facto noble class within a system that is supposedly egalitarian. For centuries, Syeds have received financial and social benefits from their birth because, being descended from Muhammad, they are allegedly more perfect or holy than other Muslims. For the 95 percent of non-Arab Muslims who cannot boast of such ancestry there is no comparable benefit.

On the contrary, Islam breeds and makes use of poverty in its effort to expand its influence through demographic conquest and terror. Ordinary Muslims like Gulzar Khan (mentioned above) breed foot soldiers for Islam. From the poorer ranks of Muslims, terrorists are often recruited to carry out attacks in the name of religion. Ajmal Kasab, a Pakistani terrorist, is an example of this trend. Kasab, the only militant taken alive by the police during the 2008 Mumbai Terror Attacks, was from a simple Pakistani laboring family. This is standard practice for Islam. Illiterate, failed, unemployable criminals are routinely recruited to become terrorists with promises of wealth and immortality. Kasab was told that his sacrifice would clear all family debts and lead to a promising marriage for his sister. For around 150,000 Pakistani Rupees (about $1,500 USD) Kasab and the nine other Mumbai terrorists were recruited to kill. This is how cheap life becomes under Islam: $1,500 is enough to get a terrorist to kill innocent people.

The teachings of Muhammad do not benefit anyone outside of the elites of the Muslim world. The 95 percent of the Muslim masses become little more than tools like Kasab who are manipulated and bought by the elite for their own purposes. In short, the teachings of Muhammad do not lead to progress for humanity, they lead to exploitation. The myth of the ummah is only a tool used in this exploitation.

TURKEY

The last Islamic caliphate in the world was the old Ottoman Empire. Today, the homeland of the Ottomans is the erstwhile secular republic of Turkey. In recent years, however, the secular nation of Turkey has been returning to its former orientation under the iron fist of Recep Erdogan and his explicitly Islamic AKP Party. While many apologists claim this government is a “moderate” Muslim regime, there is nothing moderate about its philosophy or its ambitions.

The danger posed by Turkey is illustrated by its unwillingness to engage ISIS even as it conducts massacres on Turkey’s doorstep. Newsweek recently revealed “the extent to which the cooperation of the Turkish military” has been allowing ISIS forces “to travel through Turkish territory to reinforce fighters battling Kurdish forces.”86 This aid comes at the same time as the rest of NATO is seeking to disable and destroy ISIS.

Turkey is justifiably suspected of complicity with the jihadists of ISIS in their quest to establish an Islamic caliphate. Should Turkey become a pro-jihadist state, it would be a formidable enemy in Europe itself, capable of striking directly or facilitating the funneling of jihadists into Europe. Even now, as a NATO member, Turkey could facilitate such an infiltration. The West and even the entire non-Islamic world should do everything to encourage Turkey to return to the policies of founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and to disempower the Islamic imperialists now driving the nation toward a confrontation.

THE FAILURE OF THE UNITED STATES TO DEFEAT ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM

It is time for the United States and its allies to unambiguously and directly oppose the Islamization of the world and to vigorously defend and promote secularism and secular values. The absurdity of defending jihad nations like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia while isolating secular regimes in Syria and Egypt must end. If the non-Islamic world is to avoid the fate of the destroyed civilizations that have been swallowed up by Islamic imperialism, we must consider how we have failed to contain and defeat the threat of Islam. Only then can we correct the course.

The roots of America’s failed response to the threat of Islam lie in the Cold War. As part of its strategy to contain and frustrate the Soviet Union, America spent decades supporting some of the most extreme jihadists in the world. Scholar John Cooley’s book Unholy Wars has documented this approach, which he calls “a strange love affair which went disastrously wrong.” His summary of his findings deserves to be quoted in full:

In the 1950s and 1960s, the administrations of four US presidents—Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—all faced the task of defending American interests in the Middle East and south Asia. Like President Harry S. Truman before them in 1945-53, they perceived those interests as interconnected. Protection of strategic geography and defending sea and air access routes were linked to defending the vast reservoirs of oil and natural gas in and around the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, which the industrial world had begun exploiting and depended upon. In addition to these concerns, though often incompatible with them, was defending the security of the new State of Israel.

These interests emerged as consequences of the Second World War of 1939- 45. At the onset of the American-Soviet Cold War in 1946, President Truman perceived the Soviet Union as the principal threat to American interests, in the Middle East as elsewhere. This perception was to persist for the next half-century. US administrations of the 1960s, to be sure, so regarded “world communism,” embodied in dictator Joseph Stalin’s system of Soviet hegemony. Western Europe’s leaders, under the American-forged shield of the NATO alliance since 1949, in general thought the same way. In France, Greece and Italy, the new CIA gave massive financial aid to Rightist parties to enable them to defeat the Communists.

Western analysts in the think tanks and intelligence services in Washington, London, Paris, Rome and elsewhere asked themselves, who or what is the principal enemy of our enemy, communism? How can that chief enemy help us? At the same time, how can we oppose Third World leaders and doctrines perceived as handmaidens of communism, such as President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt (1954-1970) and his dubious doctrine of “Arab socialism?” There were consultations with planners and politicians in conservative Muslim and Arab states, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Many of them opposed both Soviet communism, its home-grown sub-species, and Nasserism (even though they also bitterly opposed Nasser’s main adversary, Israel). The tacit consensus was that the Muslim religion, fundamentally anti-Communist, if translated into politics, could be harnessed as a mighty force to oppose Moscow in the Cold Wars, in a world growingly polarized by that war.

Thus began what was, at first, merely a flirtation between America and Islam. Its expression was at first only modest and cautious support, usually covert, for Islam’s political activists—I choose to call them Islamist, rather than the worn out and inappropriate term “fundamentalists.” Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its branches and affiliates throughout the Muslim world, from Syria and Jordan to Indonesia, received encouragement and sometimes money, when they became engaged against local or Soviet Communists. Later, by the mid-1960’s, came talk of an anti-Nasser and anti-Soviet “Islamic Pact,” led by the ultra-conservative and hyper-religious Saudi Arabian monarch—talk which, echoed from Pakistan, alarmed the mixed Hindu-Muslim, but secularly-ruled state of India, as well as the less conservative Arab states. The American flirtation with Islamism became a serious affair. Britain and France, in particular, helped the United States to conduct this affair. Often their governments or information media sought to represent their colonial or post-colonial wars, aimed at preserving their contested and crumbling rule in North Africa, southern Arabia or the Persian Gulf, as part of the struggle against “communism;” therefore worthy of US support.

…[President] Carter’s team, spearheaded by (Zbigniew) Brzezinski, perceived the foolhardy Soviet invasion not only as a major international threat, but also as an opportunity to undermine the already tottering Soviet empire by lying north of Afghanistan, in Central Asia. So the American love affair with Islamism was now raised another notch in intensity. It became a marriage of convenience. It was consummated in an alliance with Islamist military dictator of Pakistan, desirous for his own reasons to cleanse Afghanistan of the Soviets and their Afghan satellite regime and, if possible, advance Pakistan’s strategic and commercial influence northward into South Asia.

…Even in the training of more than 50,000 Muslim mercenaries to fight the Russians, the CIA chose the proxy method. Pakistani ISI officers and a few key Afghan guerrilla leaders were first secretly schooled in the service training centers of the CIA and the US Army and Navy Special Forces in the United States. Main training took place under the watchful eyes of the Pakistanis and sometimes a very few CIA officers—in Pakistan and, eventually, in areas of Afghanistan free of Soviet troops and the Communist Afghan government. Various open and hidden channels and stratagems were used to send arms supplies. Early in the war, the Americans gave Pakistan full control of training and allocation of the cash resources, weapons and logistical support for the holy warriors. A variety of sources financed the war, and the post-war conversion of the fighters into international terrorists. First came US taxpayers’ funds during President Ronald Reagan’s two administrations (1981-89). Saudi Arabia’s public and private contributors, like bin Laden, matched American funds dollar for dollar. The fraudulent BCCI bank and the drug trade provided more billions.87

As Cooley shows in his book, America’s short-sighted policy greatly hampered the Islamic world’s incipient moves toward secularism and modernism. The Muslims were ready to join the 20th century, but to keep them out of the Soviet sphere of influence, America left them in the hands of seventh century Islamists.

Afghanistan is the prime example of America’s approach. After the Soviet invasion in the late 70s, America joined with the Saudis and the Pakistanis to fund the training and recruitment of virulent jihadists. Osama bin Laden, as this book has described, got his start in jihad by providing funding and material for these fighters. But once the Soviet threat was removed, the jihadists remained. Afghanistan went from a modernizing and comparatively open society, as it had been in the 1960s, to a backward, war-torn, and religiously strict society in the 1990s. With all non-jihadist forces having been opposed by Pakistan and its American allies, the Taliban seized control and allowed its territory to become a training ground for global terrorists.

In recent years America has seemingly doubled down on its catastrophic Cold War policies. The disastrous alliances with treacherous enemies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan continue, while the U.S. seeks to overthrow secular dictators like Syria’s Bashar Al Assad with little thought for the jihadists who will most likely take his place. From the Cold War era to today America has consistently and continually failed to acknowledge that Islam itself presents a threat to its interests. As historian Robert E. Kaplan has observed, since the 1990s, the United States has staged military interventions repeatedly in areas that had once been part of the old Ottoman Empire:

In each, a secular regime was ultimately replaced by an Islamist one favoring sharia law and the creation of a world-wide Caliphate. The countries that experienced the “Arab Spring” of the 2010s without the help of American military intervention, Tunisia and Egypt, had also been part of the Ottoman Empire, and also ended up with Islamist regimes.

Each U.S. military action in Europe and the Middle East since 1990, however, with the exception of Iraq, has followed an overt pattern: First there is an armed conflict within the country where the intervention will take place. American news media heavily report this conflict. The “good guys” in the story are the rebels. The “bad guys,” to be attacked by American military force, are brutally anti-democratic, and committers of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Prestigious public figures, NGOs, judicial and quasi-judicial bodies and international organizations call for supporting the rebels and attacking the regime. Next, the American president orders American logistical support and arms supplies for the rebels. Finally the American president orders military attack under the auspices of NATO in support of the rebels. The attack usually consists of aerial bombing, today’s equivalent of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ gunboat which could attack coastal cities of militarily weak countries without fear of retaliation. The ultimate outcome of each American intervention is the replacement of a secular government with an Islamist regime in an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire.88

In short, Jihadi terrorism is the illegitimate child of America’s promiscuous post-war, anti- Communist, anti-Soviet, and anti-Russian foreign policy. And we are still siding with those who hate us the most.

Today, this failure has left America open to infiltration by hostile forces who seek to undermine and destroy it from within. The example of the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for America was cited earlier in this chapter and has been discussed previously in this book. In addition to the MB, there are also pressure groups and alleged charities such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which spread disinformation about Islam and oppose attempts to look critically at Islam or America’s relations with Islamic regimes.

Shaukri Abu-Baker, the cofounder of another of the MB’s American affiliates, described the double game Muslim apologists in the United States like to play. In a recorded conversation Baker explained that he couldn’t go to Americans and explain “I demand the ’48 borders [of Israel]” because it would never be accepted. Instead, “I approach it through humanitarian suffering, refugees’ rights and issues which the Americans will agree with you on.”89 Omar Ahmed, the founder and first president of CAIR, concurred with Baker’s approach, commenting that “the media person among us will recognize that you send two messages; one to the Americans and one to the Muslims.”90

Thanks to successful playing of this double game, a fifth column such as CAIR is able to operate successfully on the American public. CAIR poses as an advocate for Muslim civil liberties in public, but in private they support terrorism. According to court testimony by U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg, “from its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists.”91 CAIR has so far managed to avoid legal indictment over its connections, but many of its individual officers have not been so lucky. One officer, Randall Royer, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his connections with terrorists in 2003. He had been the head of a cell of Virginia-based jihadists who were plotting attacks against D.C.-area targets.92

This is how Islamists in the U.S. operate. First, they cast themselves in the role of victims. Here they are aided by Americans on the political Left who are dedicated to supporting the rights of those they perceive as oppressed minority groups. Then they try to obfuscate any charges brought against them by deferring to claims of free speech. This approach, too, gains Leftist and Liberal cover and support. Third, they toss accusations of bigotry and prejudice freely against their opponents in an attempt to undermine and delegitimize any efforts to reveal the truth. This last tactic has proven particularly resilient and impervious to the facts.

The facts, however, are not on the side of the MB or CAIR. Omar Ahmad summed up CAIR’s intentions thus: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant … The Qur’an should be the highest authority in America.” As Daniel Pipes has accurately observed, “CAIR forwards its program by focusing on one topic: silencing those who have anything negative to say about militant Islam.”93

CAIR likes to draw attention to purported hate crimes against Muslims, but the numbers do not support their allegations. In 2011, there were 157 incidents targeting Muslims and 771 targeting Jews in the United States (Muslims and Jews are roughly equal as a percentage of the total population).94 In short, there is no factual basis for any claims that America has an “Islamophobia” problem. In fact, as the late Christopher Hitchens rightly observed, “Islamophobia” itself is “a stupid neologism” which mostly serves “to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.”95

Liberal American culture and its worship of multiculturalism have become one of jihad’s greatest weapons against the United States. Instead of recognizing and fighting the enemy, America spends its resources defending, protecting, and flattering a viper in its bosom. To fix this problem, America must recognize that this path is one of national suicide. Promotion of Islam goes hand in hand with cultural relativism and non-stop efforts in the media and in the educational system to denigrate, apologize for, and despise America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage.

In order to fight Islamization, nations must find the courage to value their own culture and heritage. America owes a great deal to its immigrants, true, but the establishment of freedom, rule of law, and commerce that have made it a beacon of hope is thanks in large part to its Anglo-Saxon foundation. Those who follow the doctrine of multiculturalism and spit on America’s legal, ideological, and cultural antecedents are foolish, deceptive, and dangerous. As we have seen around the world, parasitical Islam flourishes on the ruin of great civilizations. There is no future for the West if it abandons its distinctive heritage to embrace a platitudinous and vacuous relativism that gives succor to that which must be fought.

We must treat our enemies as enemies. This means deporting Islamic supremacists, separatists, and jihadist ideologues and imams, while enacting strict restrictions on Muslim immigration. Membership in Nazi and Communist groups has long prevented immigration to America, and there is no reason why the same standard should not be applied to Islam as well.

Defeating Islam’s evil empire also means supporting groups at home and abroad that the U.S. has traditionally shied away from. This includes secularists, socialists, atheists, and others. It also means making common cause with countries such as Russia and India, who have suffered greatly at the hands of jihadists. These are the countries we should be embracing as friends rather than Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. America’s foreign policy should be based on a clear perception of its own national interests, not on the influence of wealthy foreign lobbies, on the considerations of political correctness, or on the blackmail of false friends.

America also can still reach out to those on the Left who have been misled by cultural relativism and political correctness. If the Left can grasp the truth of Islam and the danger that it poses to the liberties and minorities Leftists wish to champion, it can be a valuable ally in the fight. When the true racism and imperialism at the heart of Islam is understood, the Left’s support for Islam should wane. A similar effort could be made to reach those Muslims who fled to escape the oppression of sharia law. This can be done by re-emphasizing America’s secular and empirical tradition, and above all its constitutionally enforced neutrality on religion.

Similarly, America can gain new allies and friends while also strengthening its own society by emphasizing and implementing economic policies favoring the interests of the American people rather than those of international corporations. This is the America that people around the world yearn to believe in again. It is an America that recognizes evil and fights it, an America that promotes justice for the individual and freedom from religious and ideological tyranny.

THE FAILURE OF INDIA

Having been exposed to Islamic conquest for over 1,300 years, India and the Hindus have some of the longest experience with Islamic imperialism. Yet they have also committed serious errors in their response to the Islamic threat. As such, India stands today as a warning of what not to do. The chief cause of the Hindu failure has been a false epistemology and worldview. They mistakenly believe that Islam is a rival metaphysical system, another competing religion like Buddhism. In fact, Islam is a civilizational enemy. The conflict in India is between Hindu civilization and Arab imperialism.

The Islamic conquest of India began 1,300 years ago and is still ongoing, despite independence in 1947. Today, 75 percent of what was originally Hindu India no longer exists as such. Similarly, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan were Hindu and Buddhist countries before Islamic conquest. One should be forgiven for thinking that the –stan suffix was of Arab origin, but instead it points to the former origin of these colonized countries. It come from the Persian word for ‘land’. Those who think Islam is a peaceful or benevolent force should compare former Buddhist lands in the “stans” with Buddhist-influenced countries such as China, Korea, or Japan. As a rule, the former are backward third world nations; the latter are rapidly developing or first world countries. The most salient difference between the two groups is the dominance of Islam in the former.

Islamic conquest happened as a result of more than military victories and massacres. Military victory is only one kind of victory, and it is far from the only weapon in Islam’s jihadist arsenal. The other weapons Islam has employed to bring down some of the world’s most impressive civilizations are deception (taqiyya) and demographic conquest.

The symbol of Hindu failure with regard to Islam is Kashmir. Islam was first introduced to this Hindu land by warfare, but it was spread by deception and demographics. The true nature of Islam was concealed. Instead, Sufis came to the country to spread an Islam that was presented as a variation on Indic religion. Once the new converts embraced Islam in its Sufi disguise, the orthodox Muslims behind the scheme promptly introduced sharia and undertook campaigns of strict submission to the fundamentalist tenets of Islam. Those who resisted were killed and their property and women taken. The Hindus were then depopulated or simply outbred to solidify Islam’s hold.

Today in the Kashmir Valley, the true natives (the Hindu Pundit community) have been forced to flee their homeland as refugees, ceding land and homes to usurpers. Successive Indian governments have remained too apathetic or impotent to stem this tide. And so the tragedy is compounded until Kashmir is entirely lost. Kashmir is a microcosm of how Islam operates everywhere. It plays soft and weak when its numbers are small, then when it gets the upper hand the conquest is completed through battle or demographic replacement. The end result is always the same—the eradication of the previously existing culture and its replacement with Arab supremacist ideology.

Hindus were hampered by their failure to understand Islam’s binary view of the world. Islam sees the world in terms of believers and unbelievers; believers are the privileged and chosen people of God, while unbelievers are those who must be conquered, massacred, exploited, taxed, and enslaved. Another weakness lay in the Hindu tendency toward accommodation. “Truth is one; the wise express it in different ways,” the old saying goes. But Islam does not believe this. Instead, Islam believes that the literal doctrine of the Qur’an and the rest of the Islamic trilogy is the truth while all else is lies, imperfection, and ignorance.

Hindus have preferred to try to integrate Islam into the fabric of India. This is also a mistake. Sufism and other varieties of allegedly moderate Islamic sects—even Shia Islam— are seen by orthodox Muslims as unacceptable compromises. They are being subjected to an escalating campaign of persecution and annihilation. Furthermore, after 1,300 years, the Semitic worldview has proven incompatible with the Hindu-Buddhist worldview. The former is exclusive and rejectionist; the latter inclusive and integrating. Any hopes entertained by non-Muslim Indians that Islam will ‘one day’ become an integral part of overall Hindu civilization is nothing but a delusion and a pipe dream. The history of Islam in India says otherwise.

It should now be candidly acknowledged that the leaders of modern India have likewise failed to understand the true character of Islam. Mohandas Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence, so successful with the British in his struggle for Indian independence, proved unrealistic with regard to Muslims. The Islamic ethos of violence and conquest meant that his nonviolence simply carried no weight with them. When India was partitioned, despite Gandhi’s best hopes, it happened in a horrific and bloody manner. The legacy of this deadly division still hobbles the Indian subcontinent, and Hindus and Muslims now threaten each other not with knives but with nuclear weapons. Gandhi failed to grasp the true character of Islam, and this led him into a fantasy of Hindu-Muslim solidarity. If allowed to persist, this fantasy will inaugurate the complete erosion of territory until Hindu India becomes a mythological idea of the past.

The independence of India itself has been a failure. Consider three simple facts. First, when the British were in India there was no constant military threat to its people. Pakistan now has more than one hundred nuclear weapons, an arsenal it has developed for use within the subcontinent, putting India in perpetual and mortal danger.96 (India has fewer weapons and has made a commitment not to launch a first strike.) Second, when the British were in India there was no border dispute with China. After independence, under Jawaharlal Nehru, India fought a border war with China in which India was humiliated. Finally, when the British were in India there was a Hindu community in what is now Pakistan, comprising about 25 percent of its population. After independence, these Hindus almost all had to migrate to India, but a commensurate forced removal of Muslims to Pakistan did not take place. Therefore, Muslims in India got to have their cake and eat it too. They got Pakistan and remained a formidable force in India.

What India needs is an internal cultural revolution. This begins with a rejection of all arguments of equivalence between Islamic imperialism and Hinduism. There is no equivalence; Islamic imperialism has no parallel in Hinduism. For example, how can there be a comparison between Hindu gurus and Muslim religious leaders? Shankara was a celibate and an intellectual who spent his life in contemplation and peaceful debate. Maulana Maududi was an advocate of jihad and a sensualist. Hinduism recognizes that Islam is a religion but Islam does not reciprocate. It does not accept any Indic religion— Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, or Sikhism—as valid.

This internal revolution must also include the rejection of caste identity. No non- Hindu can possibly understand the mind-boggling issues connected with caste in India. It must be accepted that either everyone is an Untouchable or no one is. Caste should be a matter of character, not birth. One should be honored as a Brahmin not by birthright but by the quality of one’s character. Historically, many great Hindu reformers have rejected the caste divisions. If Hindu civilization is to survive, the caste culture must perish.

Furthermore, the primary divisions in Indian identity must be overcome in the face of a mutual enemy. Islam is the nemesis not only of Hindus but also of Marxists, secularists, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits—everyone. Islam plays one group against the other at present. Instead, within the nation of India, all Indians, regardless of their ideologies, should form a United Front of opposition against Islamic hegemony. Indians should actively appeal to the Muslim masses to embrace secularism and humanism. More often than not, critical examination of the Qur’an, Muhammad, and sharia will lead to the rejection of Islam. It is for this very reason that Muslim leaders disallow critical study of the life of their prophet. However, among the nearly 200 million Muslims in India, there are also many secular-

minded individuals with Hindu roots. Furthermore, the ruling Muslim classes of India consider themselves as being of foreign origin (typically Arab, Persian, Turkish, or central Asian) and inherently superior to native Indian converts. Therefore, there is an opening and an opportunity. Indian Hindus can reach out to these secular Muslims, with the examples of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ali Sina, and Ibn Warraq in mind. Apostate intellectuals can be our greatest allies. These apostates from Islam are the greatest refutation of the fearful idea that Islam’s hold on a large minority of Indians is a permanent reality. Secular- minded Muslim leaders can bring changes within their society, and non-Muslim Indians can and should support this. The Muslim masses on the Indian subcontinent should be liberated from the Arab imperialism that is Islam. These masses have never benefited from it, they have received only misery, ignorance, and a fatal theory of predestination which all keep them enslaved.

HINDU-BUDDHIST UNITY, OR, LOOK-EAST WORLDVIEW

As an integral part of its unity strategy against Islam, India should embrace the ideal of Hindu-Buddhist unity as a civilizational paradigm and the guiding principle of its foreign policy. In a globalized world where economic, technological, ideological, and military competition is the overwhelming reality, there are advantages in stressing civilizational unity. One such principle for South Asia lies in promoting the unifying idea of Dharma. A unity based on dharma would be extremely and invincibly potent in economic, military, and sociological terms.

As the progenitor of Dharmic civilization, India must take the lead. Indeed, the Buddhist countries of Asia still look to India for ideological inspiration, though India, deeply wounded by Islamic imperialism and partition, has not been up to the task of leadership for many years. Moreover, the internal divisions within Indian society, rooted in regionalism, the Hindu-Muslim divide, and the caste mindset are continuing to impede progress in all areas of Indian life. The dysfunction evident in these seemingly intractable internal problems inspires little confidence that India will soon be able to assume the mantle of leadership.

Islam is the deadliest and most potent nemesis of the Dharmic civilizational paradigm which unified Asian civilization for millennia, and in fact threatens to annihilate Dharmic civilization in its entirety. As the center of Dharmic civilization, India has been the focus of Islamic imperialism’s fury for over 1,300 years. The nations of South and East Asia, which represent the reach of Indian Dharmic civilization, are also under threat by jihadist Islam, which seeks to extirpate all Buddhist cultures. These cultures in many ways represent the survival of pre-Islamic Indian civilization at its apex.

The rage of Islam fell disproportionately heavily on Buddhism, which had highly developed and visible institutions. Such was the fury of the Islamic onslaught in India that Buddhism’s centers of learning and monasteries were decimated and the institutional support for Buddhism in India destroyed. The jihad against Buddhism now faces only one last Indian enclave in Bangladesh. It has otherwise been reduced to near extinction on the subcontinent.

That Buddhism has been driven from India is a great tragedy, as the great 19th century Hindu revivalist Swami Vivekananda acknowledged. The reintegration of Buddhism into Indian civilization would serve to restore the integrity of Hindu civilization and also enable India to be the ideological, philosophical, and cultural unifier of Asia. Buddhism is quintessentially Asian in outlook and represents the best of Hindu civilization. It is rational, compassionate, and egalitarian in its principles. It offers a truly universal outlook and is capable of embracing both science and ethical thought. It is the rational and scientific outlook of Buddhism that has enabled it to both foster dialogue with Western science and refute theological fanaticism. This approach guarantees its contemporary relevance.

Hindus today should embrace Buddhism as a great asset rather than marginalize its role in Hindu civilization. Islam cannot withstand Buddhist dialectics, a skill that has been largely lost in contemporary Hinduism. A Hinduism intellectually empowered by the rediscovery of Buddhist dialectics would have the confidence and the ability to resist the onslaughts of Islam with rational arguments unencumbered by theistic obfuscations.

Among the theistic dogmas that have come to smother Hindu society, the most egregious is caste—the belief in a divinely ordained social order valid in perpetuity. This belief is a complex borne of Hindu psychology and acts like a poison on Hindu civilization. Clinging to irrational belief in divinely ordained social divisions precludes the rational explanation offered by the Buddha: human beings themselves evolved their social and occupational divisions. Although Hindu caste divisions have parallels in other societies, the ideas have been largely discredited and repudiated around the world as incompatible with science and humanism. India would do well to follow this example. Here, too, embracing Buddhism could provide a measurable and tangible benefit.

Another benefit to embracing Buddhism would be resistance to the Semitization of Hinduism which has grown in recent years. Hindu nationalists have sought to oppose Islam by turning Hinduism into a theological opponent. In doing so, they and their allies have unwittingly bought into the theistic mindset of Abrahamic religion. Atheism, non-theism, and expedient theism have always been part of Hinduism; Hindu nationalists who want to turn Hinduism into just another pantheon of deities with its own counter-theology are completely misguided. Here, Buddhism offers a better counter to Islam because it contains an atheist or non-theistic dialectics which can be employed against the claims of Islam. If Hindu nationalists want to bring home those Hindus who converted to Islam they should regard Buddhism as a potent ally.

Only a united front of Dharmic nations can effectively counter the Islamic threat. The resources of the Dharmic block of nations far exceed those of the Islamic imperialists who want to make Asia the nucleus of their new caliphate. But consider that the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Conference represent 1.6 billion people with a collective GDP of $4.7 trillion USD. By contrast, the GDP of Japan alone, with only 127 million people, is $4.92 trillion USD. When China, Korea, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan are added to the mix, the Dharmic block commands nearly $18 trillion USD in GDP and close to three billion people. The combined wealth, technology, and military resources of the Dharmic block must be applied with a unified will against its most significant existential threat: Islamic imperialism and jihad. Only by making common cause with the rest of the Dharmic cultural sphere can India survive in its struggle with Islam. This means India must embrace its Buddhist heritage and forge new ties with the Buddhist nations of Asia—nations such as Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Japan, and China.

It is not enough merely to fight against Islamic imperialism. All the non-Arab Muslims of the world, from Bosnia to Nigeria, from Iran to Indonesia, must be liberated from it as well. All the greatest modern Islamic nations—Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan—are non-Arab in their origins. Turkey had Hellenic and Byzantine culture, Iran had Zoroastrianism, and Egypt was heir to the Coptic civilization. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan were all former Hindus and Buddhists. If human beings need religion to survive, let them embrace any of these other religions that are part of their legitimate historical heritage. Let them be Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, or even Deist like the great Founding Fathers of the United States. Anything but Islam, and this will be a positive step for all of humanity.

COMPATIBILITY OF NON-DUALISTIC INDIAN TRADITIONS AND MARXISM

This book has criticized Marxism, and especially the shortcomings and delusions of many Indian Marxists. However, for the sake of fighting a common enemy, Islam, the non- dualist traditions of Dharmic thought such as Mahayana Buddhism and Vedanta can be reconciled with Marxism. Although at first it might appear that there is little common ground between a salvific system and an explicitly materialist doctrine, there are many areas of compatibility that could become the basis for cooperation.97

It might be objected that Marxism has a materialist view of reality and focuses exclusively on the improvement of conditions in this life, while Indic systems appear to be spiritual or metaphysical in their emphasis. But this is only partially true. Both Mahayana Buddhism and Vedanta recognize two levels of truth or reality. There is a conventional level, which pertains to the material world, and a metaphysical level which pertains to the state of enlightenment. There is, however, no substantial division in reality. In other words, there really is no hard distinction between the material and the metaphysical. Furthermore, in all three systems (Mahayana Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Marxism) a rigorous dialectical process is necessary in order to understand reality and reform the self and the world accordingly.

By contrast, there are no points of compatibility between Marxism and Islam. A Muslim by definition cannot be an atheist and cannot subscribe to a wholly materialistic worldview. To a Muslim, Marxism is an absurdity, and any Muslim who subscribes to the philosophy of Marxism is marked for death. Communists have indeed been the targets of massacres in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world. No one opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as strongly as the most fervent Muslims in the country. India allows for criticism of Marxism but it does not decree the death penalty for Communists; by contrast, a recent Saudi law made it a capital offense to be an atheist. In 1965-1966, over 500,000 Communists and their sympathizers were killed by the Islamic government in Indonesia; 5,000 political prisoners in Iran were killed in 1988 by the Khomeini regime.

Indian Marxists are often the harshest critics of Hinduism and typically sympathize much more with Muslims than they do with Hindus. They should realize, however, that they enjoy the freedom and safety to take these positions only because of the tolerance of the Hindu ethos. Were they to live under Islamic masters, tolerance of their views would be nonexistent and they would have to flee the country, recant, or face execution. That this is so is proven by the simple fact that while there are many well-organized Community groups and political parties in India, there are none in neighboring Islamic Pakistan. Marxists should realize that they have a common enemy with Buddhists and Hindus. Islam does not seek coexistence, it seeks their complete subjugation and destruction. Islam is the enemy of Marxist and Hindu alike.

THE FAILURE OF ISRAEL

While Hindus and Buddhists can rightly claim to be among Islam’s most consistent victims, the hatred that the Qur’an preaches toward Jews finds new manifestations daily in the rhetoric and terror attacks of jihadists. There is no surprise that the Islamic campaign of genocide focuses so much of its attention on Israel, which was formed explicitly for the preservation of the Jews as an ethno-religious group. Israel was established in a region where the Jewish people and religion have historical and cultural roots. Unfortunately, Christianity and Islam also have roots there, and because of these contested territorial claims Israel has been dogged by conflict since its inception. Since both Jews and Arabs base their territorial claims on theology, the nature of their dispute is essentially unresolvable as it currently stands. Thanks to ongoing support from Europe and the United States, Israel has so far managed to fend off its hostile Arab neighbors. Nevertheless, those neighbors would like nothing more than to destroy Israel and re-establish total Arab-Islamic hegemony over the Middle East.

It is sometimes claimed by Islamic apologists that the Jews who lived under Islam enjoyed greater tolerance than did those who lived in Europe. Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom, MD, have both published extensively refuting this claim. It is also belied by the historical record. Legendary medieval theologian Moses Maimonides said of his Arab overlords “never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.”98 Historian Raphael Israeli describes that the enforced second-class citizenship (dhimmi status) which Jews suffered in the Islamic world “generated … a deep hatred and hostility towards the Jewish minorities throughout Islamdom.”99 Essentially, Islamic “tolerance” of Jews has always consisted in offering them a choice between subjugation and annihilation.

The relationship between Jews and Muslims (Arab Muslims in particular) illustrates a crucial point that deserves wider recognition: anti-Semitism is itself a necessary outgrowth of the exclusivity of the Semitic faiths.100 How else could one explain the anti-Semitic hatred expressed by Arabs for Jews, who are a fellow Semitic people sharing various cultural, linguistic, and even religious similarities?

It is not possible to be anti-Semitic unless one belongs to a Semitic religion. The claims of exclusivity made by the Semitic faiths have no meaning in a different religious context. If Jews claim to be the “chosen people” this is of no interest to a Hindu or Buddhist. In fact, there have been Jewish populations in India and China for many years without any concomitant history of anti-Semitic conflict. But to some Christians and to all Muslims the Jewish claim of being “chosen” is a repudiation of their own belief systems. They cannot accept it. Christian and Islamic theologies have propounded various explanations for why the Jews are not chosen (or are chosen no longer). The important thing to note is that non-Semitic religions have no interest in such theological exclusivism. Anti-Semitism, in short, is entirely a product of Semitic theology itself.

The absurdity at the heart of claims of anti-Semitism can be exposed by one simple question. Why is it right for Jews to claim to be the Chosen People but wrong for Hitler to claim that Germans were the Master Race? According to Jewish scripture, the Israelites fought their own wars of genocide to create the original land of Israel. As Jewish and Islamic history shows, the Semitic approach to religion ensures genocide and theft of land. Islam simply carries forward the same impulse which led the early Jews to conquer Palestine and applies it to the whole world. And unlike the Jews of the 21st century, Islam has not reformed its attitude or approach.

Jewish concerns over anti-Semitism at times today border on absurdity fueled by error. A crucial example of this came in 2015 with a Wall Street Journal article by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (the chief rabbi of the United Synagogue in London, the largest Jewish temple in Britain). In this article, Sacks goes so far as to claim that anti-Semitism has no Islamic basis but that when it is found in Islam it originated from Europe. A simple perusal of the Qur’an should be enough to refute this suggestion. In that work we find Jews regarded as minions of Satan and consigned to Hell.101 Jews are given a curse for killing Prophets of Allah worthy of permanent humiliation and debasement.102 They are presented as subhuman creatures comparable to swine and apes and are cursed by the tongues of David and Jesus.103

Later Islamic scholarship has merely confirmed the anti-Semitic sentiments to be found in the Qur’an. The influential cleric Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote in the 1960s that the Qur’an describes Jews accurately with “their own particular degenerate characteristics” and claims that good Jews become Muslims while bad ones go to hell. In a 2009 speech, Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaqub insisted that “we will fight, defeat and humiliate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.” By insisting on anti-Semitism as a peculiarly European phenomenon, Sacks commits a factual, historical, and strategic error. Muslims have their own brand of anti-Semitism that owes nothing to Europe, and it is merely antagonistic to a potential ally for Sacks to claim otherwise. It would be more accurate to describe the sentiments people like Sacks are fearful of as “anti- Jewish” rather than “anti-Semitic.” And there is no more anti-Jewish ideology in the world today than Islam, which is a rival Semitic religion.

Modern Israel, however, has one important point in its favor. The Jewish State was founded and built not by religious nuts but by secular Zionists who felt that it provided the best political solution to Jewish dislocation and their persecution in Europe. These secular Jewish leaders thought Jewish-Arab coexistence was not only desirable, but even essential and mutually beneficial. “We do not wish and we do not need to expel Arabs and take their place,” said David Ben-Gurion in 1937, “all our aspiration is built on the assumption—proven through all our activity in the Land—that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.”104 This is a noble sentiment, and it is entirely correct.

The spirit of Ben-Gurion should be recovered in modern Israeli politics, and the international community must stop giving succor and diplomatic victories to those in the Arab world who wish to delegitimize and reject the state of Israel. King Hussein of Jordan showed the way forward in Oslo in 1994 when he signed a peace treaty with Israel. Secular leaders such as Hussein can rise above the emotional populism that is so often exploited by rabid anti-Jewish jihadists. Hussein made his decision out of secularist, rational calculation of interests; creedal dogmas such as Islam do not allow for such compromises.

Compare King Hussein’s actions with the Hamas charter, which asserts that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” It further insists that “the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it.”105 This theologically informed intolerance cannot permit peace.

Islam and Judaism are so antagonistic toward each other because they are so similar. Both are religions of divine law; both are Semitic and uncompromisingly monotheistic. One key difference between them is that Judaism is ethnocentric while Islam is a missionary religion. A second important difference is that modern Judaism has been reformed in that it now recognizes and actually promotes theological and epistemological pluralism. Islam, however, has refused to reform itself and continues to show uncompromising hostility toward all non-Islamic religions. Professor Ivan Kalmar at the University of Toronto explains:

When the Jewish spirit rose again in the form of Islam, it did so in a historical context different from that of ancient Israel … Moreover, like Christianity, Islam threw off Jewish particularism, the insistence that God has chosen one nation over the rest … [but] universalism in its Muslim form was not something better, but something much worse … Islam is not the opponent of Judaism, but merely Judaism gone mad.106

Make no mistake. The state of Israel and Jews worldwide must recognize that it is white European and North American that are their greatest allies and their Semitic cousins, the Arabs, and Muslims worldwide are their greatest enemies. It is not the other way around, and outside of a few despicable attempts through European history to punish (or kill) the Jews, they have been able to live in relative peace and security for the vast majority of that history. Jews must refrain from the eternal charges of anti-Semitism for two very simple reasons. One, there cannot be anti-Semitism in the absence of Semitic monotheism; and two, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will exist for the next thousand years. This conflict is racial, theological, and a case of “sibling rivalry” between Arabs and Jews. Being numerically insignificant, the Jews need allies if they wish to survive in Israel. Their natural allies are the Europeans. It is therefore improper and discourteous to humiliate and denigrate those who give and support life. For the sake of their own prosperity, Jews should end the accusations of European anti-Semitism.

THE FAILURE OF EUROPE

Europe today is in the process of making the same mistakes as India. Instead of facing a military invasion, however, the Europeans are inviting mass immigration of Muslims into their countries. Under the false logic of multiculturalism, these immigrant populations are allowed to remain isolated and independent and establish de facto states within states. In many of the cities of Britain, France, and the Netherlands there are now places where native people cannot go. The Muslim inhabitants live under sharia law, ironically protected by the shadow of the traditional freedoms of Europe that these Muslims despise.

According to the reigning doctrine of multiculturalism, these Muslim populations are regarded as no threat. Europeans are told that if the Muslims in their countries behave badly it is because they were mistreated. Any problems with immigrant populations are blamed on white racism rather than on Islam. Europeans are taught to be tolerant of Muslims and are accused of prejudice if they dare to criticize them or their religion.

In such an atmosphere, Islam is permitted to grow freely and poison the well of European life. This, combined with the low birth-rate of the native European populations, has led to a looming demographic shift. In Russia today more than 10 percent of the population is Muslim, and the numbers in France may well reach that level in another decade. The most common name for a new baby in Britain today is “Muhammad.” Europe is being Islamized from within. The example of India shows the folly of acquiescing to such a change. Within a generation, the nations of Europe will be in the same condition if nothing is done to reverse the demographic trend. Doing so requires a proper assessment of the threat posed by Islam.

Fortunately, ordinary Europeans are slowly awakening to the threat. Perceptive and critical thinkers, mostly outside of official government or academic channels, are acutely aware of the situation and are beginning to vote accordingly. They are opposed by deluded leaders of the Left and Right who, imprisoned by political-correctness and multiculturalism, prefer to spout the disingenuous claim that Islam is a religion of peace. Of course, the loudest proclaimers are often recipients of Saudi funding or else are wealthy enough to live far away from the Muslim crowds to feel no threat from them.

So far, politicians in Europe have only managed to produce belated half-measures. Banning headscarves and other items of Islamic dress is superficial. Stronger measures are required to disarm Islam in Europe and to discourage its spread worldwide. The suicide of allowing large-scale Muslim immigration must be immediately halted. But, since so much of this damage has already been done, the culture of jihad and Islamic imperialism needs to be uprooted from where it has been growing within European society, choking and endangering native European culture.

Strict no-tolerance deportation policies are necessary for all jihadist imams and propagandists. If they want a jihadist society, these places exist and they should go there. But there is no moral obligation on any community to shelter and aid those who are trying to destroy it. On the contrary, there is a moral obligation to remove this threat. Similarly, madrasa-style Islamic indoctrination must be ruthlessly removed from all European schools. Should Europeans have to pay for the brainwashing of children with an ideology that holds European culture in contempt?

All of these moves require Europeans to shed the self-hating doctrines of multiculturalism, boldly and unashamedly reasserting Europe’s native cultural values and their superiority to the values of Islam. Europe is already a largely secular continent and, in this framework, rational conclusions about the true nature of Islam should not be hard to arrive at. And just as many European countries treasure their own secular ethos, they need to advocate for the same in the so-called Muslim world. At the moment, the European Left is all too eager to flatter Islam and collaborate in the lie that Islam is an anti-imperialist victim. Recognizing the imperialism and aggression of Islam will foster solidarity with its victims across the world.

Too often pan-Europeanism has been advocated by the same multiculturalist left- wingers who seek to erase European identities. But this inclination to unite across Europe should instead be utilized to present a united European front against the Islamization of its society and culture. Russia, which has suffered greatly at the hands of jihadist mass- murderers, can and should be included in this movement. Russia is not America’s enemy, they are potentially a great ally.

When Islam is seen for what it is, then it is easy to argue for the cessation of all support for Islamic regimes that oppress non-Muslims and all non-Arabs. There is a great amount of oil-production outside of Islamic countries and, therefore, no excuse for not systematically minimizing oil imports from Muslim countries that sponsor jihad, Islamic indoctrination, and madrasa-style education such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Qatar. Europe and America have

demonstrated the desire and summoned the moral will to defeat two totalitarian threats in the twentieth century. In Islam, Western Civilization faces a perennial enemy that is infinitely more potent than these past totalitarian threats. Today, Europeans are facing death by a thousand cuts at the hands of multiculturalism, jihadist terrorism, and demographic conquest (through both legal and illegal immigration from Islamic countries). The majority of Muslim immigrants in Europe refuse to assimilate and have a far greater fertility rate than native populations. They have become a de facto state within a state.

THE ETHICAL BASIS FOR TOTAL WAR AGAINST ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM

Islam says that truth comes from Allah and was revealed directly to the Prophet Muhammad. Such claims are purely metaphysical, meaning they assume the existence of a separate world outside of or beyond nature. Further, they assume that one very special person can have knowledge of this realm, and this person must be believed completely under the threat of punishment in another metaphysical realm that lies outside nature (namely, hell).

As this book has argued, such metaphysical claims fail on two points, one linguistic and one scientific. On the linguistic point, the philosopher A.J. Ayer has argued that the nature of language is such that any metaphysical statement is inherently meaningless. For a linguistic statement to make sense, it must be possible to verify its truth through sense experience. But statements such as “Allah exists” can never be verified one way or the other through the senses. Therefore they are, strictly speaking, meaningless.107 The scientific objection to metaphysics is that although someone like Muhammad may claim to have access to another realm of reality, any notions he can give us of this realm must necessarily be composed of ideas and impressions which we already have. Those ideas and impressions come to us from our observation of the physical world as we know it. Therefore, any knowledge we may be supposed to have of a metaphysical reality is actually based on our knowledge of physical reality.

It is only on the basis of careful empirical observation of the physical world that human culture has been able to advance and develop. Through a process of trial and error human beings learn about what works and what does not. Metaphysical revelations have never helped a man to build a house, streamline a process, or invent a device. Science and empirical investigations are advanced versions of this same process of trial and error that humans have always used. The proper development of science requires freedom of inquiry, which metaphysical systems such as Islam deny their followers. It also requires what philosopher Karl Popper calls falsifiability, meaning that it investigates claims that can be proven to be false or not false.

Islam puts forward claims that by definition cannot develop or advance. At the same time, they hinder all other progress by denying freedom of inquiry or the utility of studying the natural world. Islam’s claims are rooted in the seventh century teachings of a man who claimed to offer the final revelation of God to man. As such, these claims cannot be questioned, cannot be improved, and cannot be reformed. This is why Islamic movements such as al-Qaeda or ISIS are essentially nostalgia exercises. Their adherents look back to an idealized past of Muhammad’s lifetime and seek to reacquire it through brutal and literalist application of Islam’s laws.

When Islamic texts are considered from this literal perspective, one can only laugh at how childishly absurd it is. According to Islam, the Christian trinity is the father, mother, and the son.108 This is factually wrong, as any Christian could tell you, but literal Islamists must believe it. According to Islam, Allah once sent a raven to scratch up the ground to show a man how to bury his brother.109 According to Islam, genies (or jinn) are real spiritual creatures made by Allah out of fire to be adversaries to men.110 According to Islam, Muhammad once split the moon in two.111

One of the great examples of Islamic absurdity is the case of Muhammad’s “Night Journey.” Described briefly in Sura 17, this is known in great detail from the Hadith. The story itself has problems on its face because in it Muhammad claims to visit the “furthest mosque” in the world in one night and this is supposed to be in Jerusalem. However, the furthest mosque at the time when the story is alleged to have taken place was nowhere near Jerusalem. In the story, Muhammad says his body was cut open from throat to stomach and filled with special water as well as wisdom and belief. Then he was taken physically up to heaven on a white animal (something between a mule and a donkey in size, he says) and allowed to meet with Adam and Jesus and other prophets. He also met with Moses and managed to talk Allah down from requiring 50 prayers a day for his followers to only five. The whole thing reads like one of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”

When the metaphysical claims of Muhammad are rejected we can see his actions in their proper light. What Muhammad was doing was an attempt to secure power and the superiority of his own people over that of others. His elimination of the Banu Qurayza tribe in Medina was not a divine act mandated by Allah as an example of what should happen to those who betrayed the Prophet. It was nothing more than genocide to clear the city of a competing tribe and acquire that tribe’s possessions for his own people. His marriage to the six-year-old Aisha was not some complicated holy marriage; it was a disturbing and pedophilic relationship from a man who seems to have been inordinately fond of a wide variety of sexual conquests. The example Muhammad set for his followers is clearly not a spiritual example but the example of a warlord. It is no accident that his most ardent and vocal followers today all seem to be low-level warlords dreaming of greater power and glory. Once the metaphysical justifications of Muhammad’s actions are removed we can see that he was not a religious hero at all; he was Genghis Khan with a theology.

We can expand this claim more broadly to include any metaphysical justification used for war. There is no such thing as religious conflict, in a sense. Wars are always fought over territory and property. A religious justification is nothing more than a myth or a story to disguise unjust desires for someone else’s things. One of the earliest examples of this religious hoax comes in the Old Testament with Joshua’s siege of Jericho. According to the account in Exodus, Yahweh gifted the land of Canaan and all its property to the Israelites and commanded them to destroy the people of Jericho. Following these divine commands, therefore, the Israelites destroyed the city, killed all the adult males, and even slaughtered the animals. The virgins of the city were taken by their Hebrew captors. The present atrocities of ISIS and Boko Haram are essentially reenactments of this same pattern. It is not a righteous war these groups are carrying on, it is slaughter with mythical justification.

The opposition to Islam must proceed from an epistemological rather than a metaphysical basis. It is not God who commands us to hate or fear the Muslims, it is history, Muslim threats, and hateful and murderous Muslim actions. Simple human prudence tells us to act on behalf of our own self-preservation. On a global level our opposition begins with a United Front of the Victims of Jihad. The Hindus, Buddhists, Middle Eastern Christians, African Christians, Jews, and Russians are all on the firing line when it comes to suffering violence directly at the hands of Islam.

A United Front could easily include as many as 90 percent of Muslims as well since Islam offers them little more than oppression and uses them as pawns against the infidel. Today’s Muslims are mostly descendants of Islam’s earlier victims. The world should therefore bring them education into rationalist and empirical ways of thinking and free them from mental slavery and superstition. If human beings can develop empirical sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology, they can also deconstruct absurd metaphysics and theologies that harm them. Women in particular deserve to be liberated from the yoke of Islamic oppression that renders them third-class citizens. Generally, the governments of Islamic countries should be reformed along the model established by Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. This model emphasizes secularism, democracy, and critical thought. Ataturk established a vigilant state to monitor Turkish society, encourage its modernization, and keep Islamic fundamentalism at bay.

A United Front against Islam should promote secular revolution, particularly in the Islamic world. In the 1950s such a revolution was already underway when it was halted and reversed thanks in part to the social and economic failures of Arab socialism but also to the misguided Cold War policy of the United States. Such a revolution should be encouraged again to promote the values of secularism and empiricism around the Islamic world. The advantages of such an approach are obvious: increased wealth, increased freedom, and increased enjoyment of life.

WHAT THE WORLD CAN DO

The entire Middle East must be demilitarized, democratized, and secularized if the ideology of Islamic imperialism is to be defeated. This will not be solely a matter of military struggle. The aim should be accomplished by logical persuasion when possible, by propaganda when useful, and by force when necessary. It is an ideological battle as well as a physical one. As such, the universities will be a key battleground. Just as the jihadists have used madrasas and Islamic universities to spread their hateful dogmas, the spirit of free inquiry can be kept alive and spread through Western-style universities. If these bulwarks of knowledge fall prey to political correctness and multicultural weak-mindedness it diminishes and disables our ability to combat Islam.

Above all, the non-Muslim world must promote the ideals of free minds and free markets. One of the earliest methods for promoting free inquiry was the development and encouragement of the art of disputation known as dialectics. This method was used by such luminaries as Buddha, Socrates, Aristotle, and the great Hindu philosopher Sankara. Islam, which is based on faith and submission, makes little use of dialectical thinking. Dialectical thinking is crucial for the dissemination of a rational worldview and allows for development and progress for humanity. In short, Muslims should emulate Socrates, not Muhammad.

One of the best examples of the free minds and free markets approach can be found on the Korean Peninsula. The North concentrated on obedience to a dictatorial leader and the development of military might. The South embraced American-style free minds and free markets. Less than 60 years later, the different results of the two approaches are stark. South Korea has been transformed from a mostly uncultured nation of illiterate farmers into a global economic powerhouse. Their cousins in the North are mired in cultural and economic stagnation, kept afloat by China.

Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia enjoy enormous wealth due to their surplus of valuable hydrocarbons. Yet what have such countries accomplished for all their wealth? Compare the scientific and cultural achievements of Saudi Arabia with those of South Korea and the results are stark. The Saudis have wealth, yes, but they use it to acquire luxury goods designed and made elsewhere. They have comparatively few scientific contributions of note. They have made little mark on the world outside of luxury good purchases and terrorism. The best-known Saudi Arabian of the last 60 years is Osama bin Laden.

Islam plunders rather than adds to the wealth of non-Islamic civilizations. Consider the case of Mes Aynek in Afghanistan. This region is home to what could be more than $100 billion worth of copper deposits. The copper is sitting beneath the ruins of a flourishing Buddhist civilization from centuries ago. Located along the fabled Silk Road, this area held temples, a copper smelter, and signs of the merging of multiple cultures over a period spanning multiple generations. The whole region was seized forcibly by Muslims and subjected to demographic conquest. Today, the country is finding it difficult to take advantage of either the cultural or the mineral wealth lying under the soil. Ask a simple question: does Islam make the Afghans more or less likely to access and utilize this wealth? Has there been any improvement in the material and spiritual comfort of the Afghan people since they were forced to leave Hinduism and Buddhism in the 8th century? For centuries, Afghanistan was the home of Buddhist universities and monasteries for celibate monks. Today, it is home to nearly 1.6 million heroin addicts.112 Many children, girls and boys, are sexually abused by grown men.113 In what way has Afghanistan benefited from its forcible conversion to Islam?

The Western countries achieved unprecedented wealth through an embrace of free speech, critical thought, the scientific method, and religious tolerance. One of the hallmarks of this embrace is the Constitution of the United States of America. The Constitution takes as a bedrock assumption that the free people of a country may come together to decide for themselves how they wish to be governed:

The American Constitution … lays out its bold theme – that all power derives from the people – with force and grace … The Constitution’s root principle, deeply embedded in its overall structure in countless clauses, is popular sovereignty: rule by the People.114

Unlike Islam, the Constitution also acts to protect the interests of minority groups from being completely overrun, as Thomas Jefferson so eloquently stated:

Bear in mind that this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.115

It has endured for more than two centuries because it offers flexibility, allowing for the people to change their minds over time as new discoveries or new ways of living become common.

Islam is eternally hostile to the West in its guiding principles. Its metaphysical ideology demands submission to the revealed word of Allah. Any speech or thought which runs counter to that word is not permitted; therefore, there can be no freedom of speech or critical thought in Islam. According to Islam, the way of life it presents is perfect and complete. Therefore there can be no growth, no flexibility, no change. The U.S. Constitution allows amendments, but there are no amendments in Islam. Furthermore, Muslims are taught that they must destroy all non-believers in order to usher in an age of eternal peace.

The only intelligent response from non-believers of the world must be to oppose Islam— beginning by countering its most pressing current threat, which is demographic overrun.

For all Western nations, the demographic threat from Islam must be countered immediately and decisively. Mass immigration from Islamic countries must end. The practice of importing labor from Muslim countries must stop. In combating terrorism worldwide, we must all accept the logic and necessity of profiling. There is no reason to pretend that disabled elderly white women are a legitimate terror threat on par with young men from Islamic countries. The demographic profile of typical terrorists is well known and it should be utilized prudently and effectively. Further, it is both impossible and suicidal to completely shut down any nation due to terror threats. You can’t close malls, roadways, airports, schools, stadiums, hospitals, or other public places simply out of fear. Instead, the best way to handle the threat is to profile or perish. When the predominant terrorist threat comes from immigrant Arab men, there is no reason to pretend that elderly white women are an equal danger.

There is ample proof that the nations of the East should make common cause with the West to combat Islam. In January 2015, ISIS kidnapped two Japanese men and filmed a video demanding $200 million for the release of the hostages or else they would be killed. “Although you are more than 8,500 kilometers away from the Islamic State, you willingly volunteered to take part in this crusade,” a masked representative of ISIS told the Japanese on the video.116 The Japanese men were beheaded. China, too, has been subject to attacks. In 2014, nearly 100 people (59 of them terrorists) were killed in a terror attack in China’s Xinjiang province. In what was described as a “premeditated” act, a gang armed with knives and similar weapons attacked both civilians and police and vandalized multiple vehicles. According to the Chinese news agency, the attack was masterminded by someone connected to a terror organization known as the “East Turkestan Islamic Movement.”117 Clearly, both China and Japan have a common cause in opposing Islam.

The battle against Islam should also be local. Individuals must take the initiative. In the early stages, it may well be individuals alone who do so, as many of the leaders of the world remain mired in muddled multiculturalist thinking which prevents them from seeing the threat posed by Islam. What individuals can do varies a great deal according to their country of origin and walk of life, but bear in mind that individuals in democratic societies are far less restricted than the courageous people in Muslim societies under sharia.

First, Americans who enjoy the best freedom of speech protections in the world should take full advantage of those protections. We are permitted to speak out against virtually anything and to express our views without fear of censure. The Internet provides an excellent platform; it is the death of Islam. Use it to create blogs or study groups and to educate others about the threat. Make your voice heard. Above all, do not forget that the constitution of Islam lies in the Qur’an; the Qur’an is the complete antithesis of the U.S. Constitution. The two cannot co-exist.

Next, Americans should get organized. We need citizen revolutionaries in the fight against Islam. Whoever reads this book can become a leader in the fight, whether at a grassroots level or above. Work with mayors, town councils, and representatives at all levels. Those with the time and resources can organize and influence political pressure groups such as AARP, which already enjoy considerable leverage with politicians. Voting blocks and pressure groups can have an impressive effect over American political policy. If enough people get organized to resist the influence of Islam, they can carry significant weight. Retired persons in the United States are potentially one of the most powerful forces imaginable in the fight against Islam. They have the time, the resources, and the willpower to make a difference. All that is needed is full awareness of the nature of the threat.

Individuals in Europe may have many similar rights to Americans, but their situation offers certain unique opportunities and limitations. Direct criticism of Islam is somewhat limited in many European countries (compared to what is possible in the U.S.) due to restrictions on speech which officials deem “hateful” toward a religion. At the same time, however, Europeans already have existing political parties that have the restriction of Islamic immigration and Islamic influence in their platforms. Europeans should support such parties, and encourage other political parties to work with them and grant their demands. Individuals in Europe should make their fellow citizens aware of the danger of Islam and the necessity of making a stand against it; they should also encourage the assertion of local and national identity against Islamic encroachment on the one hand and bland “multiculturalism” on the other.

In the Middle East and Africa, in countries with Muslim majorities or large Muslim minorities, a systematic campaign of education is necessary to deter the development of Islamic literalism. Such education should focus not on theology but on secular ethics, critical thought, and scientific inquiry. Islam has no defense against the penetrating inquiry of reason and empiricism because its claims cannot be rationally justified. This strategy would be effective in these regions because it does not by itself provoke open confrontation with Islamic ideologues. Instead of opposing Islam directly, individuals will simply work toward developing a reasonable alternative to Islam. Once the benefits of that alternative become clear, it will become easier for members of society to join in.

Islam has been far more damaging to Africa than Europeans ever were. Muslims ran the slave trade in much of Africa for centuries, working its own African slaves to death in the Middle East long before Western nations, save the Romans, took up the practice. Muslims were also the last to give up slavery, with some nations (notably Saudi Arabia) not even outlawing slavery until the 1960s. The Muslim nation of Mauritania was the last nation to do so in 2003. Just a few years ago, Saudi Arabia had a Facebook advertisement for the sale of a “black castrated slave.”118 Today, de facto slavery still exists in the GCC in the form of migrant workers (as this book has amply documented). Only free minds and free markets will save Africa from the threat of Islamic imperialism.

Individuals in India, Pakistan, and Iran should consider themselves heirs to a non- Islamic civilization whose greatness should be rediscovered. Muslims in Pakistan are Hindus who have abandoned their superior cultural heritage for a fanatical medieval outlook that offers them nothing but self-destruction. In Iran, the Aryan civilization of Persia is already remembered with pride by most young Iranians.

SECULAR HUMANISM AS A SUPERIOR ALTERNATIVE

The alternative to Islam is not a rival theology—not Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism—it is secularism. In the words of Oxford philosopher Shabbir Akhtar, secular humanism is the “most astute and energetic contemporary antagonist of Islam.”119 Secular humanism is the necessary antidote to Muslim ideologues trapped in a medieval mentality. Islam has infinite energy to combat rival theologies with assertions based on faith, but it has no grounds to answer empirical observations and scientific reasoning.

The theology of Islam has been the driving force behind Islamic imperialism since Muhammad first created it. Most of the Muslim world follows a literalist interpretation of Islam which is intransigent to reason and scientific thinking and is responsible for the stagnation of traditional Muslim societies. As the world progresses through its embrace of secular humanist principles, literalist Islam remains unable to accommodate or compromise with secularism. This is because Islam demands unthinking allegiance to theological dogmas and to the cult of Muhammad. For Islamic scholars, any deviation from literal Islam is blasphemy, and any refutation is considered apostasy punishable by death.

The premise of secular humanism, by contrast, is that reason and experience, scientific method, and openness to change and adaptability should be the driving forces of civilization. Dogmas based in revelation are to be left alone or cast aside. In the words of Scottish philosopher David Hume:

If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of face and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.120

Since the Enlightenment, the West has embraced these principles and left behind the era of religious wars. It has developed science and technology to a high degree and made rapid advancement. By comparison, the Islamic nations have stagnated and declined.

Literal Islam, based in the seventh century conditions of Muhammad, is unable to accommodate new facts uncovered by science and the exercise of reason. It is unable to deal with the developments of technologies and devices unimagined by Muhammad. The only option literal Islam has in the face of the modern world is to return to the seventh century. This is neither acceptable nor desirable. Secular humanism is premised on the free use of reason and choice. Literal Islam insists that Quranic injunctions guide and micromanage every aspect of a Muslim’s life, leaving no room for privacy or conscience. Islam forbids free thinking and moral choice. All thought and conscience is predetermined by Quranic dictates.

Given the fundamental incompatibility of the ideologies of Islam and secular humanism, it is easy to see why the latter is seen as a mortal threat to Islam. Muslims who hesitate to embrace secular humanist values show that Islam is really very brittle and unable to survive the tests of free thought and rational inquiry. Islam therefore reacts defensively and with hostility to the advances of secular humanism. The violence of Islam’s reaction reveals its weakness. Muslim ideologues sense that the fantasy of a return to the seventh century Arabian utopia would be abandoned as a relic if the Muslim masses embraced rational thought and modern science.

Fortunately, there are precedents in the nations that make up the Islamic world for establishing secular regimes. Iran in the 1950s and 60s was governed by a secular modern government under Reza Shah Pahlavi. Modern Turkey was established after the First World War by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a defiantly secularist nation. In Syria, the Assad family has implemented a variety of secular and social reforms, including women’s suffrage. Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia are all secular nations. Kosovo’s constitution declares it is a secular state that will remain neutral in matters of religious beliefs. Secularism is not foreign to Islamic countries. Rather, these are examples to build upon.

Secular humanism is the most potent antidote to the poison of Islamic claims. The absurdities of theology cannot stand in the face of the relentless pursuit of reason and empiricism. Islam will not be defeated by rival religions and certainly not by foolish political correctness. We must have the courage of our convictions; reason is our guide.

INFIDELS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Uniting a grand coalition of infidels from around the world against Islam will save us from the existential threat and free Muslims themselves from Islam. Creating such a coalition requires us to learn from past mistakes. In the wake of 9/11, America and the West awoke to the threat of Islam, but the focus and strategy were all wrong. Convincing themselves that jihadists were just aberrations, Western governments embarked on a strategy of targeted campaigns against individuals and specific groups. Afghanistan and Iraq became key battlegrounds. But by ignoring and denying the fundamentally Islamic ideology behind the groups they wanted to target, Western governments ensured their approach would fail. The enemy is the ideology of Islamic imperialism. Individual terrorists and groups are a secondary set of enemies. Terrorists kill and die to defend their worldview, their metaphysics, and their epistemology (or lack thereof ).

For the world to correctly identify the threat and unite against it we must put aside less urgent antagonisms and grievances. For example, the days of opposing or withholding support from Leftist secularists in the Middle East must be left in the past. Such people are our greatest potential allies in the region. There may be real causes of disagreement between Western governments and Middle East Leftists, but these pale in comparison to our common foe. Similarly, it is important for Israel to focus on Israel’s and Europe’s mutual enemy, rather than European anti-Semitism. Most of the anti-Semitism currently visible in Europe comes from its Muslim minorities. By focusing on their common enemy, Israel and its European allies can enhance their mutual security while establishing a more stable and long-term partnership.

The non-Muslim world must promote and defend secularism because secularism is the greatest adversary of Islamic imperialism. Reason is infinitely more potent than Allah’s revelation. Secular humanism is an existential threat to the fairy tales of Islam because it is based on reason, logic, and experience. Our greatest weapon against Islam is the relentless pursuit of reason. It is reason that liberates all human beings—the millions of Muslim masses included. Islam cannot withstand anything like critical thought or empirical deconstruction. A critical examination of the doctrine of Islam and the life and teachings of Muhammad is the necessary prelude to the victory of the free world over the tyranny of Islam.

Infidels of the world can help launch the secular revolution that the Middle East so clearly and so desperately needs. In many cases, this revolution is exactly what the people most desire, even if they may not know it yet. It is clear that non-Muslims around the world share a vital common interest in the fight against Islam. But perhaps it is not so well appreciated just how many of those we regard as Muslims are actually prisoners in the Islamic world, gaining no benefits from Islam. Hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world are born with two stark options: either agree to follow the faith of their parents or face the death penalty for apostasy. The former choice, one can easily imagine, is not always accepted with enthusiasm so much as resignation. Many of these Muslims, and particularly the non-Arabs, are only second-class citizens of an illusory ummah; they are Islam’s greatest and most pitiful victims.

A key lesser antagonism that must be overcome to assemble this grand coalition is the one between Russia and the West. Russia is a rational geopolitical power that poses no serious demographic threat. They are part of Western Civilization and well aware of the threat posed by Islam because they and much of the Orthodox Christian world have been living at Islam’s doorstep for centuries. Instead of sanctioning Russia over a quibble about the Ukraine, we should be embracing them as an ally in the struggle against our common Islamic enemy.

Across Europe, great historical heritages are being abandoned by the politically correct as they are being attacked by genocidal Muslims. It is time for all nations to choose sides in this clash of civilizations. There is no multicultural middle ground. Do we want to preserve Teutonic, Nordic, Slavic, Anglo-Saxon, Hellenic, and other native cultures? Does the inheritance of classical civilization merit preservation? If so there is no alternative but to fight Arab imperialism or Islam will obliterate all of it. It is a mistake to combat Islam with religion. Culture, race, and language are much stronger bonds. To call Western civilization “Judeo-Christian” is inaccurate and self-defeating. It ignores the contributions of Hellenic, Germanic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and other cultures to the whole. People must be willing to stand up for these cultural traditions and preserve them.

The threat is not what Western governments and the media would have you believe. The root problem is not bin Laden. It is not al-Qaeda. It is not the Palestinians. It is not Iran, or ISIS, or Boko Haram. The problem is Muhammad, sharia law, and the Qur’an. It is a so-called religion that stands in sharp contrast to the true religions of the world. The problem is Muhammad’s teachings, Muhammad’s example, and Muhammad’s creation. It is the creation of a man who shares little in common with the truly religious leaders of the world like Jesus, Buddha, or Confucius. The problem is Islam.

To fight Islam we must launch a global movement of counter-jihad. This movement can and should be started by regular people just like you and me. Infidels of the world unite!