“The world wants to be deceived.” — Sebastian Brant, Ship of Fools, 1494
Immediately following every terrorist attack there is always the usual burst of exculpatory commentary on how the religion of Islam is in no way connected to the terrorism committed by Muslims. Muslims are the most common victims of terrorism, so how can we point the finger at their religion as being the source of this terrorism? How can we blame Islam, oft purported to be “the religion of peace,” for the terrorism now plaguing Western democracies?
The fact that this specious argument remains for the Leftist and the anarchist and the globalist the basic justification for the exculpation of Islam from the crimes the rest of thinking humanity know it is guilty of is reason enough to address the issue yet again. And isn’t it ludicrous that these same apologists have been forced – for lack of a better argument – to invent an exculpatory phrase (“Islamophobia”) in order to delegitimize the various anxieties that this very religion is causing to those who covet the freedom of living without such fears, and who remain convinced that no religion should carry along with its boasts of salubrious virtues an imposing reputation for violence and intolerance also?
Douglas Murray writes in England’s Spectator: “For a decade and a half the West has adopted this reasoning. If a group of men fly planes into the Twin Towers all the leaders of the free world rush to the local Islamic centre to extol the wonders of Islam. When a group of British Muslims blow up the London transport system the city’s police chiefs wave away the smoke and immediately extol the peacefulness of Islam. And when a suicide bomber in Manchester blows up 22 young people as they leave a concert, the one thing nobody must say is that there is any connection whatsoever with Islam. The problem cannot be Islam. Yet the answer apparently always is.” The question to be asked here is not why we are counseled to react this way – a very important and necessary question. But the more important question is, who is counseling us to react this way? Certainly not those who have never consented to be part of the Left’s multiculturalism experiment.
The fact that Muslims have always been the majority of victims of Islamic terrorism further inculpates, rather than exculpates, this religion for the terrorism it creates. The political upheavals and the religious sectarianism that Islam incubates and fosters in those countries where Islam is the predominant religion is not and never has been the fault of Western imperialism. If one digs deep enough into the history of the Middle East, one soon discovers that Islam, during its stormy advent in the Arabian Peninsula, simultaneously gave rise to a very distinct strain of religiously induced imperialism, an imperialism more notorious for displacing conquered peoples than the much maligned Zionism could ever rival.
The same Islamic imperialism is at work today, with far more finesse and just as much bloodshed. As Andrew Wheatcroft noted, “be certain that they will readily use the instruments of modernity when they choose, for they disseminate their ideological product by ‘viral marketing’. This viral analogy is relevant to the spread of terrorism, for infective viruses cannot be controlled by traditional ‘antibiotic’ methods.” The fact that we are now witnessing Al Quds Day marches in major Canadian and American cities, as well as the push for the inclusion of sharia law into Western judiciaries and “anti-Islamophobia” motions being passed by Western governments is proof of the well-camouflaged encroachment of this imperialism.
Irene Nemirovsky said it best: “They’re trying to make us believe we live in the age of the ‘community,’ when the individual must perish so that society may live, and we don’t want to see that it is society that is dying so the tyrants can live.” And we allow this to happen because our world wants to be deceived, as Sebastian Brant wrote. We don’t want to believe that the West has retreated and been forced into this war of democratic freedoms and traditions versus Islamic tyranny. But here we are, and here democracy either stands or falls, lives or dies.