In the seventh century AD, there was a Jewish group living in and around Medina called Banu Qurayza. The archangel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad while he was bathing and asked him why he rested while Allah’s enemies remained nearby. Gabriel directed Muhammad to take up arms against the Qurayza.
Muhammad’s forces besieged Banu Qurayza until the Jews surrendered. The men were beheaded in Medina’s market, and the rest were distributed as captives and made slaves. With the earlier expulsions of the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir, no Jewish community remained in Medina after Muhammad was done. Medina had been ethnically cleansed of Jews.
We are told that a small minority of Muslims are Islamic extremists. Yet their own prophet was an extremist. Muslims are told that Muhammad was a model man, and Muslims are to emulate him. “What would Muhammad do?” is a radically different question than “What would Jesus do?” Muhammad was not a benevolent prophet who brought love and peace for mankind. He was a genocidal megalomaniac who enslaved, killed, and maimed men and babies, and raped women. In truth, there is no difference between Islam and Hamas. Hamas is not an aberration in Islam. Hamas is Islam. (Here is where I disagree with Ed Husain. See The Final Solution: The Globalist Ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.)
We’re told that Islam means “peace.” But the peace Muslims seek is achieved by eliminating all non-Muslims. Yet even that doesn’t bring peace. Muslims kill each other. What Islam literally means is “submission” or “surrender.” To whom is the world supposed to surrender? Muslims tell us: submit to the will of Allah. But who speaks for Allah? Muslim clerics and terrorists. Therefore, what Islam really means is submission to the will of Muslims. If one doesn’t submit to Muslims, then one is beheaded or enslaved. The Muslim may offer conversion, but that is itself a form of enslavement.
What is happening today in the territory the Roman Empire rebranded “Palestine” to punish the Jews is only a present-day instantiation of what Muslims have always done. They invade, enslave, and exterminate. Gazans are no different than Nazis. Their leaders ascended to power the same way the Nazis did: the popular vote. Gazans elected Hamas knowing that Islam settles for nothing less than world domination. The main villain at the heart of both genocidal worldviews is the Jews. (See Jew-Hatred in the Arab-Muslim World: An Ancient and Persistent Hatred; The Danger of Missing the Point: Historical Analogies and the Israel-Gaza Conflict; Why the Israel-Gaza War Is Not Seen Like World War II—and What That Reveals About the Present Situation.)
For those who wish to insist on distinguishing between Hamas and Gazans, I will remind them that history records that ordinary Germans enabled the Holocaust (See Daniel Goldhagen’s 1997 Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust). The Judeocide was a collective effort. To be sure, there were Germans who did not wish to see this happen, but it did not matter. They were in the minority. And they were afraid. Eliminationist antisemitism gripped enough Germans to make genocide possible. There are no good Germans in an antisemitic mob. One cannot be a good person and be an antisemite. For this reason, widespread antisemitism in Islam condemns the ideology.
The only way to deal with those hellbent on exterminating people-groups is to defeat them and deprogram the population. Deprogramming is not pretty, but it’s necessary. In the aftermath of WWII, the German population was de-Nazified. That meant eliminating the Nazi Party and its organizations, removing committed Nazis from positions of influence, punishing major offenders, and changing German institutions so that they could support a democratic society. Nazi property was confiscated. Nazi propaganda and symbols were prohibited. Nazi monuments, signs, street names, and other public manifestations were removed.
Denazification applied to education, finance, government, industry, the press, and other institutions. A university professor who had been an enthusiastic Nazi, a civil servant who had advanced through the Party, a schoolteacher who had been an active Nazi propagandist, or an industrialist who had substantially supported the regime—all could potentially be removed from his or her position. Some of the measures are uncomfortable from a free speech standpoint, to be sure, but then there is no greater threat to free speech than Nazis and Islamists.
What is required in Gaza is the elimination of Hamas and the de-Islamification of the Gazan population. This requires, as it did in Germany, the occupation of Gaza until the population is deprogrammed. Israel need not eliminate the Arabs residing there (but if they want to leave, then they should be encouraged to). More than twenty percent of the Israeli population is Arab Muslims. Self-evidently, Israel has no desire to eliminate Arabs. De-Nazification did not mean eliminating the Germans as a people. What de-Islamification does mean is eliminating an authoritarian and genocidal movement in the same way the West eliminated the Nazi state and suppressed National Socialism.
Some will say that eliminating Islam is no different than the elimination of Jews in Medina under Muhammad. If it was wrong for Muhammad to conquer the Qurayza and erase Judaism in Medina, the argument goes, then it is wrong for Israel to conquer Gaza and erase Islam in Medina. But the equivalency requires Jews and Muslims to exist on the same moral plane. To suggest they do is to claim that Jews and Nazis exist on the same moral plane. Such a claim is absurd on its face. Moreover, Jews are a people-group. Islam is an ideology, not a people. Islam is no more a people than Nazis were a people. Liberating Germans from National Socialism was the task of moral people. And so it is the task today to liberate Arabs from Islam.
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The Internet is rife with attempts to apply the Golden Rule to morally asymmetrical groups. “Israel has nuclear weapons, so why can’t Iran have them?” Because Israel and Iran are not the same. You must hate the Jews and love totalitarianism to not see that. Israel is a liberal democracy. Iran is an authoritarian state. Israel wishes only to protect its citizens. Iran and its proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah—strive to eliminate Israel. When called to military action, Israel wages defensive war, carefully avoiding civilian casualties. Iran wages aggressive war to bring about an Islamic world order and kills everybody who gets in the way. And when they aren’t killing people, they’re frightening them into silence—or conscripting the disaffected into their ranks.
The defenders of Islam do the same thing in debates about the Qur’an. It has become predictable in these debates to say, “What about the Torah? There are horrors in there.” Indeed, there are. The ancient Hebrews of three thousand years ago were like their neighbors. They were tribal. Kill or be killed was the way of the world. Conquest, slavery, and genocide were normal in ancient times. But the modern Jew is not the ancient Hebrew. He kills not for conquest but in self-preservation.
We cannot say the same for the modern Muslim. The horrors of October 7, 2023, testify to the grim reality that Muslims today are of the same character as those who eliminated the Banu Qurayza, beheading Jewish men and raping Jewish women. Muslims have not changed. And they won’t change because, unlike the Judeo-Christian tradition, Islam is intrinsically totalitarian.
Jews did not wish to convert others to Judaism. Christians no longer spread the Gospel by the sword but by persuasion. Indeed, we rightly condemn those periods when Christians behaved otherwise. We condemn forced conversion because we in the West are allowed to criticize faith. Criticizing Islam is risky business. Muslims will claim there is no compulsion in Islam, but those who have been forced into it beg to differ.
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Having agreed that the Torah documents atrocities, how does that make the Qur’an okay? Is it okay for Bob to kill Tom because Bill killed Tim? Stalin and Mao killed millions. Does that make Hitler less evil?
In my thirty years of teaching, during my lectures on authoritarianism, I have on more than one occasion had a student bring up Stalin in the context of my account of the Nazis’ killing operations. I will get to Stalin, I assure the student, but why raise the matter of Soviet Communism now? I am suspicious that the student is an apologist for Hitler—or supposes without any evidence that I’m an apologist for Stalin. Charitably, I don’t make my suspicions explicit, but I am suspicious, nonetheless.
Flip the scenario. Suppose I was talking about the atrocities perpetrated by Stalin and a student reminds the class that Hitler also committed atrocities. As we can see from the stickers on his laptop, he is a socialist. Is he downplaying Stalin’s crime because Hitler was also a criminal? An objective account of the Soviet Union makes socialism rather unattractive, after all. It is reasonable to suppose that the socialist student is trying to hold on to his faith. His invocation of Hitler is a deflection. “What about Hitler?” should also always be met with suspicion.
Wrongdoing by others does not negate wrongdoing. Your son’s bad behavior is not excused because others’ sons behave badly. If it was wrong for Moses to have commanded the Israelis to kill all the Midianite men, women, and children save the virgin females, then it was wrong for Muhammad to perpetrate atrocities in Medina. Here, we can identify a moral equivalency. The Golden Rule applies. It falls to Muslims to hold up their end of the rule. They will always fail to do so.
It is not the purpose of the defenders of Islam to find moral equivalency. The purpose of raising the Torah is to deflect from the Qur’an and the evil deeds of Muhammad. At the heart of deflection is the defense of Islam. Those who warn about Islam are portrayed as hypocrites for defending Western Civilization from the barbarian. Noticing the drastic rise of rape in several European states that accompanies Islamic migration to the region is met with charges of bigotry. The defenders of the West are “Islamophobic” for finding in Islam a warrant for rape and genocide. But a phobia is an irrational fear and loathing. There are still rational men in the West. And there remains uncorrupted instinct (see The Bad-Smell Ant: Disordering a Nation’s Protective Instinct).
freedom and reason 