Islam means “submission,” “surrender.” It’s a totalitarian ideology. The clerics will tell you that it is here that you will finally find “peace” and “safety.” But it is a place of unfreedom. Let Islam win and you will be a slave.
Watching a Muslim man burning alive his wife to give her “a teaching,” i.e., submit to the Qur’an and to him, her husband. He doesn’t even care that she will be hideously disfigured and will be in chronic pain. He never cared about her beauty or her happiness. Only her obedience. It’s the Angels of Heaven he longs for, who, if he’s well-regarded, hence the viddying of his own criminal actions, will seek out the amplification of manhood that Allah will have given him.
As I watch the woman barely moving, submitting perhaps to scripture, more likely to shock, I am thinking about the personality type possessed by the husband. He has no empathy. She has no resistance left. It’s been beaten out of her. What did she do? Probably nothing. It’s what he did. This isn’t a one off. Not in this marriage. Not in other marriages.
I see in the perpetrators of the massacres of Israelis on the October 7 no empathy. I see sadism. I have watched the GoPro cameras of the terrorists. I have watched the body cams of the Israeli soldiers in the aftermath. I see and hear joy as the Muslim men as they burn alive Jews and execute others fleeing in terror. The “warriors” laugh as they toss grenades into shelters where Jews are hiding. I see and hear the trauma of the Israeli soldiers who arrive to find no one alive—to find babies beheaded in their cribs and smoldering families in their cars.
In their own societies, Muslims are waiting for somebody to do something wrong so they can bring out the community to torture and kill them. A woman commits infidelity. What’s her punishment? She is to be buried half underground and stoned to death. It’s sport to them. A man commits a homosexual act. What’s his punishment? He’s to be thrown from a tower or hanged from a crane. In the more civilized Muslim-majority countries, it’s a sharp sword to the back of the neck.
So little do Palestinian lives matter to Hamas that they wish for them to be martyred for propaganda purposes. They hide behind their children. They hide in hospitals. They hide in schools. The travel in ambulances.
Islam is social contagion. I don’t fully know why. But that’s true of a lot of social contagion. I’m seeing TikTok videos of young non-Muslim women reading the Koran and proclaiming it to be a feminist text—then converting, covering their beauty, declaring religious ecstasy. I look at the state of women in Muslim-majority country. Did the converts look at their state before deciding to ihtida? In what way is Islam feminist? (That’s a rhetorical question. It’s not at all.) But all women should be this way, according to Islam. You’re not human. You’re kafir until you convert. This is Islamization. Take it up one way or another. By sigh or by sword. You’re tolerated while the barbarian bides time.
The woke progressive youth of the West—the disordered and depressed—are drawn to Islam not because it’s feminist, or just. Nothing like that. They’re alienated and self-loathing. They’ve no confidence in their civilization, which has done more good in the world than all others. They reject the history that has given them too much time on their hands. They’re drawn to Islam because ideology has been pressed into their brains by their teachers—ideology that is selfish, narcissist, illiberal, and totalitarian. Selfish and narcissistic, they want their movement. Their illiberalism embraces the totalitarian one.
The left today has succumbed to what Erich Fromm described long ago as the authoritarian personality. This is the phenomenology of the New Fascism. It explains the rampant antisemitism that erupted across the West in the aftermath of October 7. To be sure, it was always there, waiting to be expressed, waiting for an excuse. The ancient hatred lurked in European culture and found expression in the old fascism. If finds expression always in the clerical fascism of Islam. It now finds expression in the West as progressivism, in corporate governance. This is why the left can’t bring itself to condemn terrorism, but rather easily justify atrocities on the basis of a history our young people think they know—on the basis of an ethic of justice rooted in inhumanity. The protest has dead eyes.
This is the consequence of decades of postmodernist critical theory, postcolonial studies, and related crackpot teachings. This is the consequence of the administrative state and the technocratic organization of society—development that require the death of the republic and its democratic institutions and liberal ethics. And a culture industry that ushered in the century of the self. This is why our schools are now easily exposed as indoctrination sites and our workplaces struggle sessions conditioning students and workers in irrational belief. The cover has come off.
The end of the Cold War was not a victory for the West. It was surrender to the irrational forces of atavistic pre-modernisms. The Enlightenment is undergoing mass extinction. The barbarian is inside the gate. And our own elites let him in and gave him the keys to the kingdom. We are in the early years of WWIII. The kinetic phase is now manifest. Except in this war, the struggle is internal to nations. The West is at war with itself. We are the rebels now.
freedom and reason 