Not Islamic Fascism But Something More Sinister
By Bruce Walker (07/27/06)
Good people - good conservative people grappling for a way to describe the current world war between good and evil - have latched onto the term Islamic Fascism to describe the dangerous lying sadism stalking the planet today. The reasoning behind using that term goes something like this. Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the current Baathist thugs ruling Damascus, the former Baathist thugs ruling Baghdad and the current brutal mullahs of Teheran are Moslems, so the threat is Islam. The monsters trying all over the world to terrorize humanity into surrendering to evil are Fascists because, well, because that is the only politically correct term used today to describe evil totalitarianism. Unfortunately, both words in the term Islamic Fascism are not only wrong, but each creates more problems than it solves.
Islam has sometimes been a force against evil. Afghan Moslems resisted the invading armies of the Soviet Union almost single-handedly for ten years. These fearless warriors were a critical element in bringing down the Evil Empire. How did America defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan? American special forces fought side by side with devout and brave Moslems of the Northern Alliance. The Shah of Iran used modernized Islam to improve life in his nation, before he was overthrown and replaced by the current evil mullahs. During the Second World War, it was the Arab Legion of Amir Abdullah which provided critical military support in defeating the pro-Axis Vichy forces in Syria and then the pro-Nazi Iraqi forces; Abdullah was not just a good Moslem, but a descendent of Mohammed.
Islam is not a “religion of peace” – some of the critiques of Islam are probably long overdue - but Islam is also not a “religion of evil.” Islam does not work as well as the Judeo-Christian faith, but nothing works as well as the Judeo-Christian faith. Suicide bombers are nothing new: remember Kamikaze pilots in the Second World War? Evil, not Islam, is the problem.
Many evil regimes in the world are hostile to Islam. Kim Jong Il, ruler of North Korea, times his saber rattling to distract America in the Middle East and Near Asia and supplies Iran with weapons and support. His tortured, tiny empire always sides with these so-called Islamic Fascists against America and Israel. China cynically plots to weaken America for the next hot war, using Moslems as pawns in a grand chess game.
Castro and Hugo Chavez support terrorism in the Middle East and Near Asia. In June 2006, Hugo Chavez visited Iran, Syria, China and North Korea to show solidarity with these enemies of America and Israel. Cuba is the nation most hostile to Israel in the entire Western Hemisphere and it is one of only seven regimes formally classified by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism. Latin America is brimming with terrorism that threatens us, and which we ignore at our peril.
Are these threats Islamic? Kim Jong Il is not Moslem nor are the rulers in Peking. Kim Jong Il has converted Marxism into a sort of “man-god” theology, with his father, the “Great Leader,” and him as the “Dear Leader,” made divine, but this bears no resemblance at all to Islam. The Chinese have, in fact, a “Moslem problem” and are more apt to be suppressing Moslems simply for being Moslems than almost any other nation on Earth (except, perhaps, North Korea.) Castro is a militant atheist, not a Moslem at all. Hugo Chavez is nominally a Catholic (although the Catholic Church has been one of the fiercest opponents of his Marxist regime in Venezuela.) The terrorists in Columbia and Peru are not inspired by the Koran. How, then, could any of these be characterized as “Islamic” anything? They cannot, of course.
Today there is serious talk by serious people that the real culprit is anti-Semitism, and it undoubtedly true that anti-Semitism is raising its ugly head again. But anti-Semitism as a horrible evil was present in Nazi Germany, in the Soviet Union and even in Imperial Japan, which had almost no Jews or Moslems. (Ironically, the only evil totalitarians who were long strong opponents of anti-Semitism in the last century were the Fascists, who were also long the strongest opponents of the Nazis for many years.) It is not Islam, peculiarly, that descends into anti-Semitism and its attendant evil, but all forms of true evil inevitably become anti-Semitic.
What about those craven, corrupt apologists for global terrorism who take their pot shots at America safely behind the lines of our bloodied troops? Senator Patty Murray famously said after 9-11 that Osama bin Ladin did much good, building hospitals and schools, and that poverty drove people into al-Qaida (nonsense, of course.) Yet is Murray Islamic? Hardly. What about Cindy Sheehan and Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, slavish excusers of savage evil. Are they Moslems? No.
Jacques Chirac is a not Moslem. Vladimir Putin is not Moslem and he, in fact, kills Moslems. Yet both presidents lean strongly toward the side of evil in the global war today. These and other many other supporters of evil obviously have a faith that transcends reason, but it is often not the faith of Islam or faith in God of any sort.
Another problem with the Islamic part of Islamic Fascism is that Arab totalitarianism has not always even been Moslem. Most people recognize that the Baathist Party of Saddam Hussein is evil and so would consider that Baathist Party as part of Islamic Fascism. Yet the single good thing anyone can say about the Baathist Party of Iraq is that it was not Islamic: it was, in fact, overtly secular; the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq under Hussein was Tarik Aziz, a Christian. Most people recognize that the Baathist Party of Assad in Syria is also evil, and yet how many people know that the founder of the Baathist Party itself, both the Syrian and the Iraqi branches, was Michel Aflaq, a Christian? The Baathist Party was intended to represent the forces of Arab nationalism, not Islam. Kemal Ataturk and those others who murdered over one million Armenians in the first holocaust of this century were militantly secular and scrupulously exclude Islam from the Turkish Republic.
Christians and Jews can, and have, cast their lot with the worst forces of evil in the world. Aside from the awful Christians, like Aziz, there have been awful Jews. Lazar Kaganovich, the Heinrich Himmler of the Gulag, was Jewish as was Genrich Yagoda, head of Stalin’s secret police. Some of the most vicious foes of Israel today are Jews and some of the most cynical apologists for evil in America have been Jewish. Surrendering to evil is an individual decision and neither Torah nor Christ can prevent people from choosing to be evil.
If Islamic is an inaccurate term to describe our current war on evil, the Fascism is even less accurate. Fascism existed as a ruling regime in precisely one country in human history, Fascist Italy, and although it has come to be used as a generic curse for any movement on the non-existent Far Right, any examination of the forces of evil show that they are all on the very real Far Left.
Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez – all passionate supporters of evil today – have done everything humanly possible to place themselves as far to the Left as they can. China stubbornly holds on to Marxism and Maoism as its formal political framework.
The motto of the Baathist Party is “Unity, Freedom, Socialism” sounds remarkably like every Left-wing organization in the world. The Baathist Party itself was relatively small until in 1952 it merged with the Arab Socialist Party. The Baathists were the party within Syria that favored close ties with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Ali Salih al-Sa’di, the practical leader of the Baathist Party during much of the 1960s, declared himself a Marxist. General Afif al-Bizri, the army chief of staff in Syria, was a Marxist. The Baathist Party in Jordan never gained power, but it also worked closely with the Communist Party in Jordan. Clearly this parent of two terrorist nations – Syria and Iraq – and in other parts of Islam is not on the nonexistent Far Right but rather on the very real Far Left (and allied with atheistic Marxism.)
The strongest supporters in America of the global evil we face are on the Far Left – Sheehan, Murray, McKinney as well as their counterparts in the parliamentary democracies of other nations. According to the politically correct ideological spectrum, which places Fascism on the Far Right, this not only makes no sense but it is flatly contradictory. Why is this so?
The Right – or rather, what has been called the Right or Far Right – the group of people who embrace truth and decency and who do not consider themselves anywhere on an invented political spectrum with Fascism at one end and Marxism at the other end – there are the only people fighting the common evil that we find in Hezbollah, Baathists, al-Qaida, North Korea, Cuba, China and elsewhere. Fascism is the Far Right according to the punditry of political science on our campuses and in our media. So how can those who war on America, the nation farthest to the Right on Earth, and Israel be Fascist? They cannot, of course, any more than they can be Islamic or, even worse, Islamic Fascist.
Is there a way to explain the vast evil that connects Kim Jong Il to Cindy Sheehan to Osama bin Ladin to Jacques Chirac to the Shiite mullahs of Iran? Yes, there is: I have written an entire book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, which describes how evil could come from a Baathist Party founded by a Christian Syrian and run by an Iraqi Marxist, how evil could come from atheist Communists in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and China who openly side with that which we have come to call Islamic Fascism, and how this evil is exactly the same evil that was Hitler and Stalin: that evil is Sinisterism.
The salient characteristics of Sinisterism are an insatiable lust for power and a willingness to do anything, especially deliberate lying, to acquire or to maintain power. This one term describes the odd continuum that travels from bin Ladin, laughing with his companions at the gullibility of suicide pilots, to the pandemic dishonesty of the American Left, to the absurd lies of North Korea and Iran.
Sinisterists hate Jews, Christians, Israel or America for being Jews, Christians, Israel or America. Sinisterism explains why the Baathist Party could be allies of Hitler and then allies of the Soviets, why the man-god Kim Jong Il supports the mullahs of Iran, why the atheist Castro trains Palestinian terrorists, and why the good guys – conservatives in democracies, loyal citizens of Israel and serious Jews and Christians – also find themselves on the same side, whatever their other differences.
The enemy we are fighting today is not just like the enemy we fought in the Second World War or the Cold War, the enemy we fight today is the same enemy we fought in the Second World War and in the Cold War. The common enemy of all decent people is Sinisterism. It seeks to destroy all serious Christians, all the Jewish people, the State of Israel and America. And then it seeks to plunge mankind into the sort of dark, eternal nightmare which George Orwell described so well. Know your enemy, and our enemy – as Christians, as Jews, as Americans or as Israelis – is Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Bruce Walker
