Islam, the Supreme Religious Archetype of War

 

Islam, the Supreme Religious Archetype of War

 Prof. Paul Eidelberg

More than 1,000 wars have occurred in the last 2,500 years in the West alone!  This means that war is the norm of international relations, that peace is only a period during which nations prepare—or fail to prepare—for war.

Since state-sponsored terrorism may be deemed acts of war, many thousands of wars have taken place since the resurgence of Islam. The ideological pinnacle of that resurgence was the Iranian revolution of 1979, probably the profoundest revolution in history whose end is nowhere in sight. Disdaining political correctness, that revolution, inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini, should be understood as Islam's declaration of war against Christianity and Judaism. This is precisely what his disciple, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, envisions by his malediction "Death to America" and his vow to wipe Israel off the map.

 Let me offer a "politically incorrect" view of Islam. Islam is ideological TNT waiting to be ignited by virtually any sincere Muslim. I mean a Muslim animated by the most distinctive and enduring Islamic imperative, Jihad. This imperative is sanctified by Islamic theology. It is propagated in the mandrasas and in the school books of all Muslims. I am alluding especially to the Quran and the Hadith. The latter records the sayings and deeds of Muhammad—a pagan warrior who adorned Islam with the veneer of monotheism.

With this backdrop, it should be clear that 9/11 was an act of war against the United States. To this day, however, the American government has failed to identify the enemy. The enemy is not "high-jacked" Islam but undiluted Islam, Islam without any euphemistic adjectives. However, this enemy, unlike Nazism, has no national boundaries. There are some 56 Islamic oriented states. They constitute the Islamic bloc in the United Nations, a bloc hostile to the United States and Israel.

Islam's multiple membership in the UN makes Muslims all the more arrogant and brazen. Despite the fact that the United States is a superpower, recall how a group of Muslims supporting the Iranian Revolution took over the American Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days (November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981). This was a blatant act of war. Indicative of this war, but hardly known to most Americans, is the existence of Muslim sleeper cells that have been operating in the United States for decades. Washington is waiting for them to wake up. Many Americans may never wake up as a consequence.

No American President is going to ask Congress to declare war against Islam—a religion ensconced in 56 countries represented in the United Nations. How, indeed, can Congress declare war against Islam when President George Bush said, the day after 9/11, that Islam is a religion of peace? Future historians may say that on that day America lost the war against Islam. Mr. Bush and his successors have repeatedly intoned the misleading notion that the enemy is "international terrorism." Fighting against such an enemy is more nebulous than fighting against National Socialism. What promotes this deadly folly?

America is a secular democratic state. Its elites worship an ancient dogma: "separation of religion and state." This dogma, mischievously linked to the First Amendment of the Federal Constitution, has emasculated the Government's ability to identify, let alone wage war against, the enemy. The Government must pretend that the United States is not engaged in a religious war.

 The September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the New York World Trade Center differs from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The terrorists came primarily from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two countries ostensibly at peace with the United States. What was Washington to do?

America is in a conceptual strait-jacket. Its leaders—Democrats and Republicans—are secular humanists. Ignoring history and the ubiquity of war, they harbor the modern and complacent liberal idea that the advancement of science will alleviate poverty and put an end to the scourge of war.  In other words, regardless of party label, America's ruling class, animated by the desire for peace, believe in a technological solution to the human problem: the punctuated violence of human history. They forget that Germany was the most advanced scientific country in the world. Germany was also the home of philosophy and refined culture: Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Herder, Schelling. Yet, the same Germany precipitated the bloodiest war in human history and perpetrated, with the indifference of humanistic democracies, the Holocaust. This occurred in Christian Europe awash in rivers of blood.

Allow me to approach Islam via Matthew 10:34, "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." This could well have been the battle cry of Muhammad. Jihad is the key imperative of the Quran, which Churchill called the "Mein Kampf of war." According to the Center for the Study of Political Islam, since the advent of Islam fourteen centuries ago, Muslims have slaughtered some 270 million human beings in the name of Allah!  

The Hindus, another numerous people, worship Shiva, the god of destruction.  Their sacred text, the Bhagavid Gita, exalts war.  Rulers, who necessarily come from the warrior caste, are obliged to discipline their subjects to wage aggressive wars against neighboring states whenever feasible.  As one writer observes, "Peace emerges from India's literature and history either as stagnation, or as a time for plotting military action, or as a ruse of war meant to induce somnolence and moral disarmament in enemy ranks."

Although Buddhism arose in protest against the Hindu caste system, it did not alter the prevailing orientation toward war. In Japan, Zen Buddhism combined with Shintoism to establish the martial tradition (innocuously portrayed in the theatrical West).  Throughout Southeast Asia warfare has been accepted as the natural expression of the religious or political order.  Much the same may be said of all of the regions of sub-Saharan Africa.

It is in China, however, that the science of war achieved perfection. The martial classics of China exhort rulers to make their people "delight in war" and to expand the frontiers of the state.  "It is a misfortune for a prosperous country not to be at war; for in peacetime it will breed ... the cultivation of goodness, filial piety and respect for elders, detraction of war and shame at taking part in it."  In his classic, The Art of War, Sun Tzu teaches that costly battles may be avoided and the enemy states taken over intact if generals remember that all warfare is based on deception. Hence it is the commander's task to confuse the enemy in peacetime as well as in war; to manipulate the enemy's basic values and perception of reality while dissimulating one's own intentions; to cover the enemy's country with networks of spies and agents, all engaged in sewing dissension and subverting morale.  In short, the objective is to encircle the enemy's mind so that he will contribute to his own destruction—precisely what is happening today in the United States thanks to the "outreach" policy of the Obama administration vis-à-vis Muslims at home and abroad.

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The preceding observations illustrate the warlike nature of mankind. Neither religion nor science is an antidote to war. Indeed, they may render war more widespread and destructive—the case of Islam. Contrary to what half-educated atheists preach, secular humanism is not the harbinger of peace.  Many millions of people have been slaughtered to advance the cause of Marxism. What is Marxism if not secular humanism? It has been called a secular religion. It too wages war against "infidels," the bourgeoisie.

 Moralists deem war an unmitigated evil.  The truth is more complicated.  Much evil has been eliminated from the world by war—think of Nazism. More sober than the tracts of moralists is Kohelet: "There is a time for war and a time for peace."

Pacifists will not hear of this. Like Marx, they regard human nature as inherently benevolent. They deem socio-economic privations and the international system of sovereign nation-states as the basic causes of war. There is some truth to this, but it's superficial. French and English pacifism, fostered by left-wing intellectuals steeped in moral relativism, contributed to the Second World War, the bloodiest in human history.  

Certain pacifists, even in Israel, adopt the Christian precepts "love your enemy," "turn the other cheek," and "resist not evil."  This distorts normative Christianity by applying those precepts not to the individual but to the nation-state. By so doing pacifism guarantees the victory of the wicked.

This is the tendency of the "Peace Now" advocates in Israel. Although the leaders of "Peace Now" are not pacifists in the strict sense of the term, they harbor, like pacifists, a soft view of human nature. They identify justice with benevolence, an error that disarms decent people while encouraging the wicked. "Peace Now" includes various left-wing internationalists such as Israel's socialist-oriented President Shimon Peres, who deplores the sovereign state system.

Much the same may be said of President Barack Obama, a multicultural moral relativist. Mr. Obama seems to believe that the United Nations may in time metamorphose into a World Government and that this will put an end to war. Like other "one worlders," he's very naive. A World Government would not only have to possess a monopoly of power.  It would also require a network of "intelligence operatives" and "security forces" in virtually every country to ensure that none secretly develops weapons capable of challenging the World Government. Such a government would be the greatest tyranny on earth.

But a world government or Caliphate is the objective of Islam, whose, 1.5 billion worshippers populate much of this planet. Can we avoid this horrendous fate? Yes, if we identify the enemy and wage an ideologically-oriented war against this enemy, a war having victory as its goal, victory undiluted by compromise, victory pursued with the determination that animated the Allies in their conquest of Nazi Germany.◙