Abu Wabu

In honor of Islamic Fascism Awareness Week, I offer Raymond Ibrahim, the author of The Al Qaeda Reader, who addresses the similarities and differences between that book and Hitler's Mein Kampf, both blueprints for fascistic cults based on a vision of world conquest.

Fully aware of their lack of official religious credentials, bin Laden and Zawahiri have made it a point to ground their arguments in Islam’s most authoritative texts. Even the exegeses they rely upon, comes from some of the most renowned Islamic theologians. The result is that the worldview presented in The Al Qaeda Reader is not so much al Qaeda’s idiosyncratic view of things, but rather the traditional worldview of Islam. For example, al Qaeda’s insistence that Islam must one day rule the world is not of their own making: based on several Koranic verses (e.g., 2:193, 2:216, 8:39, 9:5, 9:29) and numerous hadith, which in no uncertain terms preach world conquest, the theologians and articulators of sharia law determined a long time ago that the “Abode of Islam” must always (except when militarily incapable) be at war with the “Abode of War” (e.g., the West) until the former subsumes the latter.

Similarly, al Qaeda’s condemnation of democracy is fully grounded in Islam’s unambiguous requirement that the faithful submit to sharia — that is, Allah’s — law (e.g. Koran: 3:64, 5:50, 17:9, 18:26, 33:36, 42:10), giving credence to Zawahiri’s proclamation that “whoever claims to be a ‘democratic-Muslim’ or a Muslim who calls for democracy, is like one who says about himself ‘I am a Jewish Muslim,’ or ‘I am a Christian Muslim’ — the one worse than the other. He is an apostate infidel.”

As for the Jews, much more unflattering and slanderous accusations are set against them in Islam’s most authoritative texts than in any of the above quotations from al Qaeda (for example, Koran 2:61 and 3:112). While Hitler portrayed Jews as “no lovers of water” who could be detected “with your eyes closed,” the Koran gives an account of rebellious Jews being transformed into apes and swine (see 2:65, 5:60, 7:166) — appellations still popular in parts of the Islamic world. Indeed, anyone who goes through Andrew Bostom’s upcoming tome, The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, will confront nearly 1,000 pages of anti-Semitism straight from Islam’s most authoritative sources: the Koran, the hadith, and the fatwas and treatises of the theologians.

I know idiots have a problem with the very term Islamofascism. I don't know why, since it clearly describes the mix of Islamic extremism and fascism (I still have to point that out? Really??) that is such a threat to democracy today. Perhaps it's a function of the idiots' insistence to ask why the world can't be the way they want it to be, rather than the way it actually is in fact. And the fact is that Islamofascism under Zawahiri and bin Laden is every bit as real as German fascism was under Hitler, and yet in many ways much more evil.

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I'll close with a particularly pertinent quote from Nonie Darwish, who spoke to an oppressive and intimidating audience of radical Islamists and their pet useful idiots at UC Berkely last night as part of Islamic Fascism Awareness Week. The scene reminds me of accounts of Nazi thugs shutting down their opposition in 1930s Germany:

The sad thing about this whole event was the feeling that radical Muslims and their far Left supporters would rather never criticize Islamic culture than stand up against the culture that flogs, stones, beheads and amputates limbs. Not offending a religion has become more important to the far Left (unless it is Christianity or Judaism) than human rights of Muslims and victims of terror. Honor killing and female genital mutilation can be tolerated -- but no-one better dare utter the word "Islamo-fascism."

American universities are becoming tyrannical when it comes to Conservative values and to Arab Americans who dare to speak out against the culture of jihad. It does not matter how many people in my early life in Egypt suffered from honor killing, female genital mutilation and oppression of women, I must shut up on American campuses.

And so the latest strain of fascism marches on, aided and abetted by the useful idiots it will slaughter when they are no longer useful, just as it always has.