The Religion Barrier

[Soldier4Christ]

MERICA’S EXTREME VULNERABILITY TO ISLAM:  THE RELIGION BARRIER

Americans could lose their struggle against Islamic Jihad or be forced into an extreme, mutually-destructive, war, if they do not correct their most serious, and most under-recognized, vulnerability.  This is the vulnerability non-Islamic Americans share and can be called their "religion barrier."  It means that they accord Islam the same respect that they accord Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc. simply because Islam is a religion.  Americans need to reprogram this aspect of their thinking in order to see Islam for what it is and to be able to deal with it definitively.   

Americans religion barrier permeates our culture.

Here is a paragraph of President George W. Bush's commencement address to the Air Force Academy, on 3 June 2004, illustrating the problem:

 "History is once again witnessing a great clash.  This is not a clash of civilizations.  The civilization of Islam, with its humane traditions of learning and tolerance, has no place for this violent sect of killers and aspiring tyrants.  This is not a clash of religions.  The faith of Islam teaches moral responsibility that ennobles men and women, and forbids the shedding of innocent blood. Instead, this is a clash of political visions (emphases mine)." 

This short passage fully captures this very serious, and potentially fatal, flaw in American thinking, and take note--meaning well but staying ignorant will get us all killed.

Let us set some context for understanding the problem and then correct it.

 

The "Cloaking Device" That Islam Is                                                                                                               

Islam is a global movement, the goal of which is to bring every living human being on the planet under its crushing totalitarian rule, the likes of which has never before been seen.  Some of Islam is obvious and easy to identify.  Some of it, however, lies beneath the surface, like an iceberg.  The true nature of Islam sports a remarkable disguise.

No other movement, not even Fascism or Communism, has been so determined to conquer the world and rule with such rigid, detailed, complete control over the day-to-day activities of the lives of everyone on the planet.  Islam has a multi-pronged plan in place to accomplish this goal, and it is being implemented with increasing success throughout the world.  Islam seeks to make the rest of the world become just like it: squalid, backward, and primitive.

Wherever it interfaces with populations it has not yet conquered, Islam destroys buildings, blows up men, women, and children, and imposes tight controls on people's lives.  Islam is nihilism personified.  Most of the worlds wars and conflicts are due to aggression caused by Islamists, fueled by Islam's evil doctrines.  Islam brainwashes its own children, as well as the children of the conquered, in order to assure that future generations will continue carry out Jihad.  This has been going on for 1400 years, yet the movement remains unopposed in any meaningful way anywhere in the world to this very day.

Why is Islam meeting with so little effective resistance?

The most important reason for its success today is that it has a very clever "cloaking device."  It calls itself a "religion."  The evils of Fascism and Communism, the one passively allowing Christianity, and the other openly rejecting all religion, were much more visible to the world.  These clearly political movements were content to call themselves just that: "Political movements."  They did not attempt the intellectual fraud of calling themselves "religions."

For most of the world's population, a religion is an institutionalized set of beliefs relating to the divine, and its purpose is to act as a spiritual guide in the personal lives of its followers.  Most of the world's religions embrace, at least to some degree, the laissez faire attitude of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  Judaism and Christianity do not serve as action plans for world conquest;   their sacred documents are not war manuals that describe some of the cruelest, most inhumane strategies and tactics ever devised; they receive no divine marching orders to bring the world's population into submission.

Most of us subscribe to the principle that whatever philosophy we choose as roadmaps for our lives, be it related in some way to a divine source or not, is a matter of our personal choices.  We can talk to each other about the pros and cons of each others belief systems; we can try to persuade each other to adopt our views. That is where it ends.  Force plays no role here.  For Islam, there is just one acceptable religion and way of life: Islam.  Force is indispensable to the implementation of Islam's agenda.

Since Islam claims about one billion adherents, it is often called one of the "three great religions," along with Judaism and Christianity.  Americans, accepting Islam as one of the big three, accord Islam the same respect they give to Judaism and Christianity. 

I once shared some of these confusions about Islam.  Stripping Islam of its "cloaking device" that makes it fully visible to everyone has made it easier for me to see Islam clearly.  For example, I feel no self-consciousness about thinking about Islam divorced from any association with a deity.  Freed, I cannot stand by, seeing so many good, patriotic Americans utterly paralyzed in so much of their thinking about Islam, simply because they cannot cross this "religion barrier."

How Americans View Religion

What blinds religious Americans to the realities of Islam?  Part of the answer lies in how they regard religion per se.

From early childhood, most Americans are taught that religion is a personal matter and not a subject of polite conversation (unless you know someone well enough to know that you will not tread on toes by having such a discussion).  You learn that religion must be accorded "special handling," and that religion is "above criticism."  By the time they reach adulthood, many people have developed a powerful aversion to regarding any religion as anything other than basically good.  It goes like this: Religion is good; Islam is a religion; therefore, Islam is good.

Muslims exploit this Achilles heel in Americans.  Groups such as the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) follow the pattern of the civil rights industry.  Any whiffle of critical questioning or criticism of Islam brings the cheap suits of CAIR to full throat.  As a result, many critics of Islam, infected with political correctness, back down.  Were they secure in their positions, critics would stand up to these pressure groups to defend their values.  Islamic pressure groups, meanwhile, masterfully exploit the confusion by playing this "religion card," along with racial, cultural, and immigrant cards, all of the current tools of "victimism."

Jihadists wreak death and destruction over and over, in a global "ring of fire" all around the world, wherever Islam meets non-Islam.  Their fellows create mayhem inside America, paralyzing its citizens with doubts about their relationship with Islam.  They do it for Allah and Islam.  In the sense that Muslims get away with their bullying and their demands for special treatment, privileges, and unfair, undeserved advantages,  it all means that we are not only accepting, but reinforcing Muslim bad behaviors and assertions. This makes us our own worst enemy.

The goal of Islam is to force all of the world's people to submit. "Submission" is the meaning of the word "Islam."  Submission will be accomplished through force or by voluntary conversion. (I must add here the extremely powerful attraction of Islamia to Nazism when the latter "flowered.") 

For this reason, we need to close off all avenues exploited by Islamists, from immigration to deception to intimidation.  But, before we can do that, we must strip Islam of its "protected" status as a "religion" in the minds of good Americans.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

 Can Islam Pass Evidence Tests?

(1.)  Sources of Islam

A billion believing Muslims do not make Islam true just because they believe it.  Muslims believing that Islam is a religion must provide some evidence for their claims to have any credence.  They point to the Koran and the books of the Sunnah, as though these books offer self-evident proof of their assertions.  Few have ever called Islamists' bluff to show how these same books actually totally invalidate Islam rather than substantiate it.

Islam is the complete fabrication of a man named Muhammad, who lived in the seventh century A.D.  Muhammad was an illiterate who proclaimed that Allah revealed Islam to him through the Angel Gabriel.  How do we know?  Muhammad said so.  That's it: He said so!  Millions of Muslims have surrendered their lives to the soul-destroying Islam solely on a say-so.  Judaism and Christianity have done far, far better than this to substantiate their faiths to their believers.

You and I could do what Muhammad did.  We could make up some documents and sermons, proclaim them to be revelations from a deity, give components special names, and declare all of it a religion.  It would be true because we say it is true.  Our ad hoc religion has exactly the same validity as Islam's claims.  If huge numbers believe us, and accept our religion, does it make it true?  Of course not.  Islam gets its credit as a religion because so many people believe in it.  If a billion people believe in the Religion of the Great Pumpkin, do their large numbers make it true?         

I cannot improve on the proof of Islam's fraudulence more than that provided by Craig Winn in his new book, Prophet of Doom (Cricketsong Books, 2004).  He makes a complete case, using founding documents of Islam, and objective scientific research sources.  Ibn Warraq's outstanding book, Why I Am Not a Muslim, makes the same case, but uses a different, equally valuable approach.  Together, they are unassailable.

Qusayy, Muhammad's great, great, great grandfather was a pagan, of course. He ran a religious scam in Mecca, which centered about pagan Arabs' worship of pre-Islamic gods in the rocks of the Kaaba, the large cube in the allegedly holiest spot in Mecca.  One of the pagan gods at the time of Qusayy was named "Allah" ("god" in Arabic is a different word, "ilah," which sounds quite a bit like "Allah" to our ears), sort of like "Joe" or "Sam."  Allah was one of 360 gods. He wore three hats.  He was a moon god whose special interest was agriculture, as well as a god of the sword and war. He was selected as Muhammad's favorite because of the last two hats.  His symbol was the crescent moon, a familiar sight atop many a minaret.

Qusayy was the Meccan "conventioneer par excellence," promoting and controlling the ceremonies, rituals, and all activities of pagan Arabs coming to Mecca on ubgone86 (yes, it was going on with exactly the same rituals many decades before Islam) to worship the stone gods of the Kaaba.  He ran concession stands, facilities for room and board, transportation, and regulated rituals, procedures, and all access to the Kaaba.  This religious scam was Qusayy's livelihood at least 80 years before Muhammad was born, and it was apparently profitable.  Even Qusayy invented little; he used the customs, practices, and superstitions of the tribalists.  Qusayy's genius was in his conventioneering.

After Qusayy died, his family inherited Qusayy's Meccan religious scam. Muhammad, a sort of adoptee, was kept out of inheriting any of the business by Qusayy's descendents.  In time, Muhammad took Qusayy's "five pillars" Kaaba concession from his descendents by force.  He then claimed these practices and sites as original to his own invention, which he named "Islam," and he cemented his position by having his soldiers annihilate anyone who objected.  He kept the black stone god, Allah, and used the sword to ban all the other pagan gods.  (POD, page 94)  "Allah and the Kaaba predated Muhammad by five generations.  He didn't invent them.  Nor did he conceive the pagan rituals, fairs, holy months, fasts, prostrations, taxes, and pilgrimages that made these things worth owning." 

Muhammad initially had a series of gods.  His first god was nameless.  His second god was named "Ar-Rahman," which he used interchangeably with "Lord."  Later, he used "Lord, Ar-Rahman, and Allah."  Allah shows up as Mohammad's sole god much later, in his final phase in Medina, after he had already become a full-blown terrorist.

Only Muhammad ever "heard" any of Allah's "revelations," and gave only his say so as evidence of these revelations.  The entire Koran is only what he said it was.   

Muhammad was illiterate.  His deity made "revelations" which conveniently appeared whenever he wanted something, including the wives of others, booty, or death sentences.  Muhammad made up Islam as he went along, changing what he claimed was the "unchangeable word of his god" to fit current needs and "abrogating" earlier, usually more benign, revelations from the same alleged god.  His claim to be a prophet was just that, his claim, having not a shred of evidence, much less proof.

(POD, p.58)  "Islam was derived in part from an offshoot of the religious scam concocted by Nimrod in Babylon" (POD, p107). "Islam isn't the religion of Abraham or the doctrine of the prophet Muhammad.  It is the religion of Qusayy."  You can read it for yourself, in the founding documents of Islam, or in modern synopses, or in the masterful collection in Prophet of Doom.

Another Islamic lie is that Allah revealed the Koran in Arabic so that "knowledgeable Arabs" could understand it.  At the time of the illiterate Muhammad, Arabic was a language still in its infancy in its birthplace in Syria. It did not achieve widespread use in Arabia, where Mohammad lived, until a century or two after Muhammad's death.  Few, if any, in Muhammad's time knew any Arabic.  So few knew any reading or writing at all, that none of the Koran was written for decades after the death of Muhammad. Instead, it was transmitted orally, which was a strong tradition among illiterate peoples.  Certainly none of it was ever written by Muhammad, who was illiterate, like so many of his fellows.  There are claims that some followers wrote verses on leaves and the like -- not the sort of material likely to survive for long periods.  Nothing of the sort whatsoever survives, with little wonder. 

The language question is just one of a seemingly infinite number of questions casting doubts on the validity of the Koran as it has been purported to be.  Even more questions cast doubt all of the rest of Islam.

Might there have been a few other Muslim cooks making up the stew of Islam?  Following stunningly successful conquests by Arabs of what used to be large portions of the Roman Empire, Islamic clerics collected and codified the Quran and other Islamic doctrines.  (POD, p. 100)  Until the Koran was first written some 100 years after the death of Muhammad, and for the next 200 years after that, Islam existed only as oral traditions, fashioned to retain some material, eliminate others, and to add yet other material to get a desired result, which we now call Islam (POD, p. 61).  "[T]he Islamic clerics in Baghdad who fleshed out the Quran in the eighth century attempted to make it seem more religious by usurping myths and fables from the Talmud, uninspired Jewish folklore."  "Every Islamic doctrine and ritual existed before the Quran, Muhammad, or even the first Muslim graced our world.  As Ishaq [Muhammad's first biographer, about 120 years after Muhammad's death] has correctly explained, Islam was practiced in all of its glory before the Islamic prophet was born."  (Emphasis mine.)

Koranic errors, lies, and contradictions run rife; other Islamic founding documents fare just as poorly.  Islam gets away with it for two reasons.  The first reason is that Islamists' proclaim the Koran and supportive works to be the Word of Allah, thereby making any change blasphemous and punishable by death (stoning, beheading, whatever).  The second reason comes from the power of Islam to shut down all inquisitiveness in its believers, who are made to fear to think.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

(2.)    Muhammad

Muhammad himself was a thoroughly evil man.  Quoting Prophet of Doom (p. 3), "He became a pirate, dictator, and terrorist leader.  He used Quranic scripture to justify horrific behavior: pedophilia, incest, rape, torture, assassinations, thievery, mass murder, and terror all in an unbridled orgy of sex, power, and money."  This picture of Muhammad comes from the founding documents of Islam.  Nobody has to make up anything.  The founding documents themselves tell all.

Once he had gathered enough followers, Muhammad changed from evangelist to conquistador.  He was a barbaric savage, claiming Islam as the authority for his behavior.  He was the first "Islamic terrorist," and he set the standard which Islamists follow to this day.

Muhammad competed with his contemporaries, Maslamah and Zayd, who preached the pagan Hanif doctrine in the local culture.  Hanif was almost identical to Islam; Muhammad incorporated these beliefs whole-cloth into Islam, even stealing Zayd's poetry.  Muhammad became the dominant prophet after winning a huge battle in which he destroyed his competition.                                                           

He lived among Jews, and spent a lot of time interacting with them, prior to killing them.  He "lifted" liberally from their traditions.  Islam plagiarized big-time from Judaism and the Bible, and capitalized on their terms, such as God, Prophet, Angel Gabriel, Satan, Heaven, and Hell.  Islam has never been more than "Judeo-Christianity-Lite" at best.   

Every time he wanted something, Muhammad said that Allah gave him the "revelation" that authorized his actions.  Muhammad made up each and every one of these alleged revelations.  One authorization allegedly given Muhammad by his "Allah" was for wife stealing, later topped off by his marriage to a six-year-old girl.  This wonderful fellow, however, waited until she was nine to consummate the marriage.  Does this Muhammad remind you of Jesus and his Apostles or of the great leaders of Judaism?   

(3.)  Jihad

Jihad was created by Muhammad to justify his power lust and that of his followers.  He justified his terrorism as the most efficient means of spreading the faith.  Remember, Islam exists solely to justify terror and bloody conquest by its adherents.  To this day, it faithfully retains its original agenda, and all the means it adopted to implement it.  It exists unchanged since its invention almost 1400 years ago.

Muhammad intended for "Jihad" to be a bloody instrument of conquest, looting, and enslaving.  He led many genocidal missions.  His personal cut of the booty was 20%, which he said Allah "told him" to take.  He ordered murder on a wholesale basis which Hitler, Stalin, and Mao could only hope to emulate centuries later.  Mohammad's life was a horror story on the grandest of scales.

In the West, Islam gets away with so many lies (deception is an official weapon in the Islamic war chest) because so many Westerners remain so ignorant about it.  Too few pick up the easily available, well-written materials which shine the spotlight of truth on Islam.  For example, if anyone wants a "quick fix," read Ibn Warraq's Leaving Islam.  This book presents "real life stories" from those who left Islam.  No one could begin to make up the real difficulties these people endured.  This book is a great start into understanding Islam.

Says the Prophet of Doom, "While the Islamic holy books aren't historically reliable, they are Islam, not a version, interpretation, or corruption of Islam, but the essence of the religion.  Muhammad can be no different than those books depict him."         

Here, then, is a summary of some of what we know about Islam thus far:

1.       "Allah" is a proper name.  It is not the translation of the Arabic word for "God."  Allah never existed as a supreme deity, then or now.  He was a pagan moon-sword-war god in the pagan Arab pantheon that existed long before Islam was invented, and he "lived" in a black rock, in the Kaaba.

2.       Allah did not "reveal" the Koran to Muhammad; Muhammad made it all up.  Muhammad was not Allah's apostle or prophet.  The reason he claimed revelations from an omnipotent deity was to grant himself the moral authority to act as his narcissism demanded.

3.       Muhammad stole every bit of what eventually became "Islam" from various existing sources in local culture, and ineptly plagiarized the Jewish Talmud, Jewish religious documents and practices, and the Christian Bible. At best, Islam is Judeo-Christianity-Lite.

4.       The SOLE evidence for the validity of Islam comes from Muhammad's own mouth.

5.       All of the founding documents of Islam were written from 100 - 300 years after the death of Muhammad, and all came from oral sources.  Despite what Muslims believe, these founding documents raise many doubts about their authenticity, validity, and "holiness."

6.       Muhammad created Islam as a means to achieve power over Arabia and to plunder it; he also used it as a means to effect revenge on those who opposed him.  Muhammad was one of the bloodiest terrorists and conquistadors in history.  He acted out all of his profound evil in the name of his creation "Islam" and called the process "Jihad."

7.       Islam is a political movement and a scam, a con game, run by clerics and warlords for their personal profit and to keep and expand their power base.

What we really know about Islam is that it is a set of lies, confabulations, and above all, justifications for totalitarianism.  It is immensely attractive to those who feel incompetent and lack self-confidence because it provides them a psychological and moral "exoskeleton," superficially masking their inadequacies.  It is as alien to the spirit and teachings of most other religions as though it had come from an extraterrestrial source.  If it did not have the 1400 year history of acceptance by millions of adherents, it would be held in the contempt and ridicule is deserves, and summarily discarded by all humans who become aware of it.  The success of its continuing presence and influence comes from how Islam is culturally transmitted, a story for another time.

How do Judaism and Christianity deal with criticism of their faiths?  They offer arguments in their defense. They do not issue "fatwas" against the critics (a "fatwa" is a religious edict with the power of law).

How does Islam take criticism?  It does not.  Official doctrine condemns critics to death.  In some cases, Islamists provide the non-Muslim critic with an opportunity to convert to Islam.  If he refuses, he may be condemned to death.  If the critic is a Muslim, then criticism brings him death.  No one is allowed to question the truth of Islam, even where contradictions are obvious.  One must accept, submit, believe, or face horrendous, Koranic-style punishment.   

Islamists regard "good Muslims" as those who are fully consistent practitioners of Islam.  Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia and Khomeinists from Iran are the best of these "good Muslims."  All other Muslims are considered evil because they do not practice Islam consistently.  Therefore, they are as much targets of the "good Muslims" as Americans and other infidels are.

What does Judaism or Christianity do when one of their faithful renounces his or her faith?  The Church or Synagogue attempts to persuade, or even pressure, the person, friends, and family to stop this person from becoming an apostate. They may disown or shun him.  In the long run, however, apostasy has no more impact than dropping a magazine subscription.  Such is not the case for Islam:  If you renounce Islam, you are condemned to death.  This is not negotiable.  This is Islam, the Islam that tries to call itself a "religion."

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

 Naming Islam for What It Is

Let us make the emotional leap, a leap that is really a small, intellectual step:  Stop regarding Islam as a "great religion," worthy of your protection it from scrutiny and criticism.

Call it a religion, if you must, because it uses your religion's language and has many believers.  But,  recognize it for the political evil that it is and its unremitting agenda of world-wide conquest.  Your life, the lives of your loved ones, the existence of your country, and of all your values depend on it.  You will never be able to stop Muslims and their apologists from proclaiming Islam to be a great religion.  They will always demand that you respect it and give it a blank check.  You cannot reason with them, so stop trying.  Reason only with yourself and other rational human beings.  Stop buying into Muslim psychopathology.

Start calling Islam what it is.         

Call it a toxic ideology, a death cult, even your death sentence.  In fact, Islam, among other things, is a vicious political movement, which gives itself a mantle of respectability and gets away with its actions only by providing itself with the "cloaking device" of religion.  Islam is totalitarianism.  It wants to conquer you, and kill you and yours.  It wants to destroy everything you value.

If you do not withdraw your sanction of Islam, you will play right into the Islamists' hands.  This is happening right now at the highest level of government. We watch our highest officials bowing and scraping to their future Muslim killers, while reassuring our people that Islam is peaceful, that Islam is a great religion, that Islam is wonderful, and worst of all, that Islam has been hijacked by some bad guys who twist it to their uses.  Don't be played like a Wurlitzer.  Islamists are selling you sanitized Islam while practicing the real thing. It is terribly important to remember that lying and deceit are among Islam's most valued weapons.

Jump over the religion barrier.  Keep your own peaceful religion, which teaches that the initiation of force is wrong, but that self-defense is right.  Recognize and reject Islam, which has as a central commandment to erase the Infidel -- that's you -- from the face of the earth.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

 SERIES: GETTING INTO THEIR MINDS 

Part I: The Arab Mind 

Review of Raphael Patai’s, The Arab Mind; Hatherleigh Press; ISBN: 1-57826-117-1; Revised Edition, 2002.

As I dug ever deeper into Islam after the events of 11 September 2001, I realized that my understanding of Islam needed something to supplement it, to make it more complete. Of course, I had needed to understand Islam itself.  For this, I turned, among other places, to the books of Robert Spencer (Islam Unveiled and Onward Muslim Soldiers), Ibn Warraq (Why I Am Not a Muslim), and others. As valuable as these were, and they were, and are, magnificent, I needed something else, something qualitatively different. 

After I read Raphael Patai's, The Arab Mind, I knew that I had found an exceptionally important explanation of the other component of the Islam problem: the Arab mind itself. In Dr. Patai, I had found an explanation of how Islam works on the Arab mind to produce its characteristic persona. In fact, I had found a key to being able to develop an explanation of how Islam takes normal human beings and turns them into killer robots (kill-bots) set relentlessly onto jihad. I regard this book as one of the most important books I have found about Islam and Arabs. 

It is not a new book. Written in the 1970s, it was last revised by Dr. Patai in 1983. Until recently, it lay out of print. Just as it found new life for Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield in 1991, it finds new life for our war on Islamic terrorism since 2001. A few demographic statistics might be dated, but the heart, the brain, and the very flesh of this book are as fresh as if it had been published yesterday afternoon.         

Dr. Patai became interested in the Middle East and its inhabitants in his native Hungary in pre-adolescence. He continued these studies in Germany and Hungary through the university level. He became, among other accomplishments, a scholar of the Arabic language. In 1933, he traveled to Jerusalem for further studies. He steeped himself in the living language, society, and culture of the Middle East and Arabs. After World War II, he returned to the area now known as Israel. In the ensuing years, he devoted his attention to learning all he could about conceptualizing how Arabs think, feel, and act. 

Throughout his life, he said "When it comes to the Arabs, I must admit to an incurable romanticism; nay, more than that, to having had a life-long attachment to Araby." He poured his loving scholarship into this one-of-a-kind volume, one of the very few books available today on the subject of how Arabs use their minds, and perhaps the very best. Although loving the people, he remained objective about them and their culture. Dr. Patai died in 1996. 

In my experience, forewords to books add too little that is worthy of comment. The forward to The Arab Mind is an exception. In November 2001, Army Colonel Norvell B. De Atkine wrote an unusually useful, post-11 September 2001 commentary to the present edition. He corroborates the contents and presentation of The Arab Mind from the perspective of his own special interest and study in the same field, and his twenty-five years of living in the Middle East. Using his own knowledge and experience along with this book, he taught many U. S. military leaders and soldiers how to view the inhabitants of the Middle East correctly. Like Dr. Patai, he does not engage in political correctness and cultural and moral relativism. As does Dr. Patai, he stresses the central power of the Arabic language in the shaping of Arabic behavior. Soldiers returning from the Middle East report that what they found exactly matched what Dr. Patai had written about. Without this book, our military personnel across many years would have been lost trying to understand the Arab mentality. 

The Arab Mind is almost 500 pages in length, but the meat of the text is only some 333 pages. The rest is comprised of notes, a postscript on the development during the ten years following initial publication of the book, extensive tables, and two appendices. It is worth citing the titles of the chapters as a handy way to get a snapshot grasp of the scope of the book: 

1. The Arabs and the World

2. The Group Aspects of the Mind

3. Arab Child-Rearing Practices

4. Under the Spell of Language

5. The Bedouin Substratum of the Arab Personality

6. Bedouin Values

7. The Bedouin Ethos and Modern Arab Society

8. The Realm of Sex

9. The Islamic Component of the Arab Personality

10. Extremes and Emotions, Fantasy and Reality

11. Art, Music, and Literature

12. Bilingualism, Marginality, and Ambivalence

13. Unity and Conflict

14. Conflict Resolution and "Conferentiasis"

15. The Question of Arab Stagnation

16. The Psychology of Westernization

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

 Conclusion 

Dr. Patai wrote before the disease of "political correctness," spawned in the philosophical sewers of the 1960s and 1970s, had taken hold. Nowadays, he would be accused of racial stereotyping by writing about the Arab personality. However, he defined his subject and the boundaries of his examination. He asked, "What can be common to a group is a specific feature, or a set of specific features, that social psychologists and anthropologists have reference to when they talk about national character or modal personality?" He adds, "The basis of modal personality or national character studies is the observation that human beings who grow up in a common environment exhibit, beyond their individual differences, a strong common factor in their personality."

It is this modal personality or national character that he addresses. "I would, therefore, venture to define national character as the sum total of the motives, traits, beliefs, and values shared by the plurality in a national population" (his emphasis). That is why and how he can identify, study, and conceptualize the Arab mind, and he is as correct today as he ever was, regardless of the tenor of our times. This is the basis for our recognizing and separating peoples as belonging to nationalities, races, genders, and so on, based on common characteristics, and none of this involves the devaluation of any member because of it. The context of who is an Arab is very simple: "Persons whose mother tongue is Arabic may be brought up in a non-Arab culture (e.g., in French culture in North Africa), and still consider themselves Arabs and be so considered by others." Identity comes from language for these people. Islam and the Arabic language are seamlessly fused: Islam shaped Arabic; Arabic shapes Islam; and both shape Arabs. 

This book is so rich with material that it cannot be contained in any review. Only a few of its many treasures can be alluded to. It is extremely well-written and merits study. For this review, I will focus on some of the key elements of the book which opened my mind to the nature of the Arab.

 Arabs put exceptionally high value on their language, and they are exceptionally influenced by it. Dr. Patai likens Arabic to music because of how extensively is the language linked to the emotions of Arabs. Arabs tend to be wordy, or, as Dr. Patai says, they engage extensively in "rhetoricism." Linked seamlessly to rhetoricism is their proneness to verbal exaggeration and overemphasis. If we wish someone a "speedy recovery," the Arab will tend to say "May there be upon you nothing but health, if Allah wills." Our mutually exchanged "Good Morning" becomes something like "May your day be prosperous," and you likely will receive in response, "May your day be prosperous and blessed." During the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the Iraqi Prime Minister proclaimed to the Arab joint chiefs that all they needed were a few brooms to drive the Jews into the sea. We know, however, what really happened. 

Dr. Patai explains this exaggeration as the mental phenomenon "... n which the desired event is represented as an accomplished fact." This is pure primacy of consciousness epistemology which says something is so because I want it. Baghdad Bob was a shamelessly typical user of Arab exaggeration and overemphasis [in essence, "Pay no attention to those American tanks behind me. There are no Americans in Baghdad, and we have vanquished the infidels totally."]. He sounded comical to us, but Baghdad Bob was deadly serious. If we do not learn how Arabs think, we can never deal with them effectively.

 Another predilection is for repetition. Listen to Arabs fluent in English and note how they cover the same material over and over in most of their statements. Furthermore, words do not have the same meaning as concepts to the Arab. Dr. Patai cites how our American economy of expression "...may sound weak and even doubtful to the Arabs who read it." In America, we joke when a hardhead wont take no for an answer by asking, "What part of 'no' don't you understand?" An Arab requires increasingly elaborate overstatement and repetition, with embellishment, before he accepts "No." "Yes" and "no" have indefinite meanings to Arabs.

          Another characteristic of Arabs is how they substitute words for actions. Dr. Patai quotes an Egyptian official's response to a Time Magazine interview in 1971: 

"When Arabs argue, they start on opposite sidewalks and shout at one another, 'I will carve you into pieces!' and 'You'll never live to see another sunset!' Then, after ten or 15 minutes, they walk away and nobody gets hurt." 

The Arab does not intend to carry out his threats, demands, or even his intentions. Expressing them serves to relieve emotional tension, and by uttering them, it is as though these acts had been actually carried out. Intentions, or going only to the first step toward doing something, "... serve as a substitute for achievement and accomplishment." Arabs characteristically substitute words for actions. This is one of the reasons they get so little done. 

Another Arab characteristic which is part of Arabic language is the lack of a sense of time. Dr. Patai explains the linguistic reasons for this and points out why the historical timing in the Koran is so "off." “... [T]o the mind of Muhammad, the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt (thirteenth century B.C.) and the foundation of Christianity were practically simultaneous events." On a more mundane level, "being on time" does not mean the same to Arabs as it does to us. For example, two delegations from two Arab countries joined a pan-Arab meeting for the first time on the day of adjournment. They were not considered late. 

Arabic as a language arose in Syria just slightly ahead of the formation of Islam, and it was truly in its infancy during the time of Muhammad. It grew up with Islam, and it became the official language for all Muslim conquered peoples. You can see that Islam and Arabic fused seamlessly, and they have reinforced each other. 

Arabs were mostly Bedouins, and Bedouin culture became integral to Arabic and Islam. One of its characteristics is hyper-emotionality, including emotional intensity. Little has changed among the Bedouins to this day. "Groupism" is everything, as are certain personality traits such as bravery-cowardice (honor-shame, humiliation), aggressiveness-peacefulness, or manliness-meekness, and the need for blood revenge. See if this sounds familiar these days: "The Bedouin temper is characterized by sudden flare-ups, which can easily lead to violence and even murder, followed by remorse and long periods of tranquility, inactivity, almost apathy." In our culture, this style of tension build-up and release through action occurs frequently among wife and child abusers and serial killers, among other sub-populations. 

Dr. Patai devotes a chapter to the Islamic component of the Arab personality. He stresses the fusion of Islam with each Muslim Arabs mind and each’s literal acceptance of Islam without question. This relationship makes Islam a potent shaper of the personality and life of each Muslim Arab.

He adds other Islamic influences usually not sufficiently emphasized in many works. The first is "predestination," which is as old as the Koran itself, he states. "Whatever man is or does and whatever happens to him is directly willed by Allah." Christianity and Judaism held the same belief way back then, but it was mitigated through reformations. Islam retained determinism, and it has had a profound impact on the Arab personality. "All references to the future, to what one plans to do or hopes will happen, contain the expression In shaa Ilah ("If God wills")." Think of what the pervasive belief in determinism does to anyone. Says Dr. Patai, "The smallest everyday event or activity is believed to be determined by His [Allah’s] personal decision." Another name for this is "fatalism." Allah provides, they say over and over so, why work? After all, nothing whatsoever is in your control (even whether you attain Paradise), and it doesn’t matter whether you want something, love something, or want to better yourself. Inshallah! 



cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Add to this, improvidence. "For the tradition-bound Arab mind, there is even something sinful in engaging in long-range planning, because it seems to imply that one does not put ones trust in divine providence." Such a belief has been central to centuries of impoverishment.

Any deterministic belief "... inclines the Arab to abdicate responsibility for improving his lot or providing for his future." The Arab blames his foibles and that of his society on fate or the devil, or to imperialism. When castigated for passivity or corruption, he shrugs and claims that he is forced by uncontrollable forces to be and do as he does. This is one of the biggest reasons why self-responsibility is so lacking.

          Dr. Patai closes this chapter with an eloquent paragraph:

"The fact remains that under traditional Islam, efforts at human improvement have rarely transcended ineffectuality. In general the Arab mind, dominated by Islam, has been bent more on preserving than innovating, on maintaining than improving, on continuing than initiating. In this atmosphere, whatever individual spirit of research and inquiry existed in the great age of medieval Arab culture became gradually stifled; by the fifteenth century, Arab intellectual curiosity was fast asleep. It was to remain inert until awakened four centuries later by an importunate West knocking on its doors." 

This is the mechanism by which Islam stifles and squanders human minds. Few seem to know that Islamists formally banned reason and philosophy by about 900 A.D. and forbade its citizens to think outside the Islamic box. 

The last section of this outstanding book that I want to cover is its final chapter, called "The Psychology of Westernization." I want to reemphasize that I have had to select mere tidbits from a vast banquet presented in this book. Anything I have left out must not be presumed to be unimportant: No one wants to read a fifty-page review. This book is worth being kept as a valuable reference for your library, to be read again and again, and never allowed to go out of print. 

We have two major populations today in America regarding the Middle East. One is composed of those who will not identify the Middle East, Islam, and Arabs for what they are for a host of reasons, none of which are good. The other is a much larger population of people who are simply lazily ignorant about these three areas, even after 11 September 2001. These people make too little effort to erase their ignorance, even though so much good material is available these days at such affordable costs. Both populations subvert our efforts to defend America, which begins with identifying these agents provocateurs coming from Islamia. The first population cited wring their hands that we, America, have caused Islamists to hate us; it is all our fault. The second population are perplexed about why these fanatics are trying to annihilate us. Why do they hate the West and America? 

I find Dr. Patai, in answering this, to be right on target with the basic facts and principles. However, he simply did not grasp the intensity of jihad as we are experiencing it, although he clearly defines many of the elements which are responsible for it. During the decade of the 1970s and early 1980s, when the period this book was published and revised, jihad had not yet reached the intensity and action focus that it has today. We must fill in where Dr. Patai left off.

He approaches the problem in this final chapter, which deals with how the Middle East and Arabs have related to the West. Colonialism passed, and nationalism failed to take hold fully. “... n most parts of the Arab world, decrease in political dependence on the West came to be accompanied by an increase in Western cultural influences." They interpreted this influx of culture from the West as increasing their cultural subservience to the West. Demonizing Israel worked in their cultures, so they began demonizing the West as well. 

But the Arab mind, stuffed with its characteristic contents and processes, has never been able to adapt to the process of modernization represented by the West. "It has often been observed that the Arabs are willing and even eager to accept whatever the West offers them in the way of machinery and gadgetry. The problem arises in connection with the production aspects of technology. The foundations on which technology rests remain unexplored, and the making of machines and gadgets, as distinct from their use, remains alien." “ ... The traditional Arab disdain for manual labor constantly militates against such a course [of developing them]."

         How a mind works depends on the ideas that feed it. Note how Saudi Arabia still depends on Westerners to get its oil out of its own ground and exported. By now, Saudis should have been able to manage all aspects of their own oil production. But, you are only as good as the ideas you hold. Arab societies are not called "the immovable East" for nothing. 

Another such anti-Western element worth mentioning here is the Arab inclination to personalize problems. A Swiss Arabist remarks that this mental process causes Arab countries to harbor the view that the technical difficulties of learning and adopting elements of Western civilization, instead of being part of learning curves, result from human malevolence. As such, the "difficulties" constitute a humiliation [part of the honor-shame responses utterly controlling Arab minds]. How often have we heard this response? Even a defeat in elections results in such humiliation for the loser that he often takes up arms against the victor and the government, while allying himself with those who promise victory next time. "The intrusion of impersonal, objective factors into his world makes the Arab feel impotent in overcoming defeat, and diminishes his gratification from a success which now appears as not having been the result of his ability to overcome personal antagonists." 

As we know, the Arab-Islamists look at their pitiful lot, and then project their guilt and hostility onto us. They blame us for everything, which absolves them of any responsibility and thus any ability to change. They feel that the very existence of the culture of Western civilization threatens Islam itself; it shakes these totally insecure people into fearing metaphysical oblivion. Their hatred for us is in direct proportion to their fear. 

Three elements come together to give Americans a deep understanding of the entire problem of Islam, in every respect. The factual works of Ibn Warraq, Robert Spencer, Craig Winn, and others make up the first arm. The second arm comes from philosophy; adequate understanding of Islamic philosophy provides the ability to think about the problem of Islam in terms of principles. The third arm comes from this book by Raphael Patai. It shows how the history, facts, and philosophy produce the Arab psychology; it is the Arab mind in the Arab body killing people through jihad.

If we follow all the arms, we will preserve our lives and our civilization. Once we know the Arab-Islamic mind, we can construct an effective remedy.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Covert Jihad

We will win the war against Islamic terrorism known as “jihad.”  This war kills people and breaks things, and we are engaging the enemy overseas to prevent engaging the enemy inside America.  Right?

Is there something wrong with the notion of jihad just stated?

Yes, there is.  We are taking our eyes off the prize, but the Islamists are not.  The overt war form of jihad is distracting us from the BIGGER jihad, the one that is much more effective for the enemy and much more final and lethal for us.

We can separate out these two forms of jihad so that we do not take our eyes off the prize, which is America.  The soldier versus jihadist war is the OVERT JIHAD.  What follows next in this article, we will call COVERT JIHAD.  It has the possibility of winning without firing a shot.

1.    IMMIGRATION

The covert jihad succeeds by IMMIGRATION.  Islamists flood into our country, as they are doing in Canada and Europe, and live Islamism.  In time, they reach critical mass, and, using the peaceful political means of democratic countries, they take them over.  In the final step, they convert the country to an Islamic state.

The process is intentional and involves steps, some of which are sequential and others of which require no particular order.

The process begins with immigration.  Immigration does not require legal immigration, and many Muslims arrive and remain in country illegally.  They come in at whatever rate the receiving country will allow – or not detect.  They stay in proportion to the tolerance of the host country and its failure to control legal and illegal immigration.

Europe is becoming “Eurabia.”  Muslims have been pouring in since World War II, and European countries have permitted the flood tide.  Canada has a 5 – 10% Muslim population.  France has a 10 – 20% Muslim population.  Belgium runs close to 50%.  I have no figures yet for the USA.  Neither Canada nor Europe restricts the influx, and their cultures are changing right before their eyes.  Politicians kow-tow to Muslims at the expense of the indigenous population in these countries, despite the enormous problems these Muslim enclaves cause.

All of these countries including the USA have people in gate-keeping positions of power whose minds have been totally consumed by multiculturalism and “political correctness.”  They do not mind offending the dominant populations of their respective countries, including trampling on their rights, but they become pretzels trying to avoid offending selected minority populations, including Muslims.  As a result, Muslims get away with murder, literally, and get a free pass to be and do whatever they want and not conform to the mores and laws of the host countries.  All of these countries are welfare states, so the lives of these Muslim immigrants become cushy indeed.  Islam gets preferential treatment, even deference, while Christianity and Judaism, the dominant religions, are forced to take a back seat into dhimmitude.

Muslims, once in these countries, send for their enormous extended families.  It is all legal.  It is all wrong, also.

2.    NON-ASSIMILATION

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance, someone once said.  Politicians and populaces bask, well, wallow, in profound ignorance about Islam.  All have some preconceived notion about Islam, including the notion that Islam is good, but there are some rogue Muslims who do bad things.  This is pathological psychological blindness.  People are not seeing Islam for what it is because they do not want to.  It is either not interesting enough; or it is just too much trouble because it involves reading books; or they just don’t believe the bad things said about Islam, just because…  They join those who do not want to accept any negatives about Islam because they are fifth columnists, working un-American and anti-American agendas.  For those in this group, they recognize that Islamists hate America and Islam is fundamentally incompatible with America, thus they like it because that is how poorly they regard our country.

     Accepting Islam and Islamists at face value is proving as deadly as has been predicted.  Reading as few as one, two or, at most, three basic books about Islam (two by Robert Spencer, Islam Unveiled and Onward Muslim Soldiers, and one by Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not A Muslim) opens the minds of any except those who want to evade the truth.  These books tell the conscious reader something very important about Muslims:  They will not assimilate.

          Islam declares all Muslims to be one global community, called the ummah.  For Muslims, it is all for Islam and Islam only.  Islam forbids allegiance to any nationality or any other body of ideas.  Muslims are ordered to protect each other, not to mix with non-Muslims, and to overwhelm by any means non-Muslims to force them into converting to Islam.

          France has a huge problem because its millions of Muslims cling together in Muslim ghettos and will not mix.  They do not recognize the validity of any laws that are not Islamic.  They regard all non-Muslims as fodder for them to rape, steal from, attack, etc., i.e., to regard the indigenous population as inferior and unworthy of any human consideration.  They hate non-Muslims, and they want to wipe them out, to extinguish them from the earth.  And France, serving as the perfect example, has bent over to kiss the asses of its Muslims, only to find itself hated by Muslims who stick together and plan how to take over France.  Whenever they do, they will murder the French.

          Islam teaches and enforces non-assimilation.  Islamists consider that assimilation potentially weakens Islamic values.

  3.      Populate

The average Muslim family has seven children.  The average American family has two children.  In countries which practice welfarism, these litters receive subsistence, medical care, and every benefit the government can bestow.  The Koran tells Muslims to go forth and multiply, to turn the earth into one huge Muslim domain, with Muslims in charge of all of the earth.  Muslims dutifully follow orders.

I have seen many comments indicating that demographic studies show that Europe will become Muslim this century at the present rate of Muslim immigration and breeding.  Many European birth rates are below numbers which ensure status quo, of parents just replacing themselves.

     Even in the Middle East, the median age is about 20 years.  I.e., the populations are young and demonstrate so many of the problems of youth dominance.  They have too few schools, too few jobs, too few upward mobility means, and too many of them have too much money (from oil).  They are bitter and spoiled.  They look for scapegoats, and they find America to fit their needs along with the Jews.  Al Qaeda and similar groups recruit these callow youth quite easily.

     Similarly, over-breeding and non-assimilation create large pools of callow youth in Europe.  These youth grow up in Islamic cultures with Islam deforming their minds from Day One.  The only philosophy for living they know comes from Islam, so problems breed more problems.  Islam successfully closes their minds back in the old country as well as in the West.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

  4.      Convert

Conversion applies not just to converting non-Muslims to Islam.  It also applies to converting peaceful Muslims to violent jihad.  One of the biggest sources of poison in the West lies in the mosques and their imams.  In the USA, some 80% of mosques are Saudi Arabia funded and preach the uniquely Saudi Arabian Wahhabism.  Mosques receive faxed sermons from Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia to be used for Friday prayer services.  Wahhabis hate the West, particularly America, and want to return the world to the Islamic orthodoxy of the 7th century A.D.; the world Wahhabis want would make our Puritans seem licentious.

     Wahhabis are Sunni Muslims who are the majority of Muslims world-wide.  The other large group of Muslims is the Shiites, centered predominantly but hardly exclusively in Iran.  Iran pumps up its USA mosques with Khomeinism coming from the world-conquest vision and preaching of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who single-handedly has ignited the violent jihad across the world.  Wahhabis and Khomeinists hate each other, but their great similarity and anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism presents a formidable front.

          Islam attracts young people to its violent side.  Young men want to become mujahadini, doing what they envision to be heroic deeds against us.  Islam has prepared them to be susceptible because it impairs humans by deforming human capacities against human nature.  They grow up hating because Islam has made them so deformed and ineffective.  Clever that it is, Islam also teaches them to deny their roles in their own state as well as the role of Islam which Islam tries to make them believe is all good.  Islam teaches them to displace and project their misery onto sources outside themselves and Islam.  Thus, they blame us.

          Finding others feeling as bad as they do, they tap the pool for recruits to violent jihad.

          But, growing up deformed is not unique to Islamic cultures.  We grow our own as well.  Our own callow youth look for a place to belong and an identity to adopt.  They become recruits to Islam.  Some commit violence; others find answers to why they hate so much.

          Young women find Islam fits them as well, for the same reasons.  Sour academics and others find that Islam speaks to their inner states as well.  Some others convert out of fear caused by Muslims.

          Conversion ends potential resistance in the converted, and these Westerners tend to be better true believers, who tend to evangelize and proselytize.  Islam expands.

5.    Subvert

Subversion is one of the least recognized, thus one of the most effective, methods of the covert jihad.  The Muslim Student Association, Council for Arab-Islamic Relations, ISNA, and numerous other groups have sprung up to undermine our societies, and they have been far too successful.

CAIR, for example, follows very closely the Jewish Defamation League and black civil rights groups in vigilance and action whenever a real or imagined anti-Islamic incident occurs.  CAIR contacts by phone, email, newspaper, broadcast media, and any and every other means whenever anything comes up that it turn to its advantage.  Whether the incident reflects defamation of Islam or not is less important than whether it can be twisted to appear to be defamation.  Like Jesse Jacksons, they rise up in high dudgeon bleating about the alleged nastiness of some one or some group perpetrating against Islam.  They and similar Islamic groups lobby Congress and other politicians at all levels.  They run “institutes” and all sorts of Muslim charities.

These groups intimidate through the threat of adverse publicity.  They exploit human character and philosophical weaknesses which abound in politicians and public figures.  They play the race and victim cards to the hilt because these cards play so well in our cowardly culture of the present.

They gain influence through money as well.  Behind many of these groups are Saudi Arabian oil dollars.  Money creates influence, and they play to politicians to get what they want, and what they want is to replace America’s Constitution with the Koran and Shariah.  On campus, they scare the holy hell out of the cowardly administrations and professors who will do anything to appear “politically correct.”  They threaten those they cannot buy, and they buy the rest.

Their subversion goes ceaselessly, extending to the web as well.

6.    Exploit Western values and weaknesses to Islamic ends

It disgusts me to see how well Islamists play so many Americans like the proverbial harp.  Two aspects of Islamists get insufficient recognition by Americans.  First, they have a completely alien ethics, and it is this ethics which guides them to do what they do.  Second, many of these people are quite intelligent which enables them to figure out how to use us to achieve their ends.

          We have given a partial explanation of Islamic ethics (add web address here).  Our standard is life and our goal is the optimization of our own, individual lives.  Their standard is death (going to Paradise), and their goal is self-sacrificial service to Islam.  No two ethics could be more polar opposite.  They live to serve and they live in service of Islam.  The cultures they arose from have been steeped in Islam for 1400 years; thus their every breath, whether first or fifth generation, takes in and exhales Islam and its values.  As a result, they see our happiness, pleasures, prosperity, and freedom to be both sins and weaknesses.  Never forget this:  THEY DO NOT WANT TO TAKE OVER WHAT WE HAVE – THEY WANT US TO LOSE WHAT WE HAVE.  Everything that is us and that we value is anathema to them, and they see our destruction as achieving ethical excellence.

          Second, our values and behaviors stand out in bold relief to them because they are so different from theirs.  They become big targets for them.  They can study them, and they do.  Then they seek to exploit them to their own advantages.  They do it quite well.

          To date, I have not catalogued all of the ways they play us against ourselves.  I can, however, indicate some of the ways.

One of the biggest problems I call “government versus the people.”

We have immigration laws and regulations.  Were these enforced properly, we would have fewer problems by far.  We do not apply these laws fully or uniformly.  Islamists see the holes and dive through them.

          Take racial profiling, for instance.  While all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are Muslims.  These Muslims come from Islamia where people have a radically different physiognomy from the modal American.  Geography and physiognomy couple with history to identify race and religion as violently anti-American.  Racial profiling would force probable culprits to pass through a tight filter and be caught.

          Take illegal aliens, as another instance.  IF the INS and Homeland Security Department actually detect these people, they are either ignored or they undergo perfunctory handling.  Too many are adjudged to require deportation.  Sappy judges give them several months, in their own recognizance, to get ready and reappear in court to be sent back.  Guess what?  They become nowhere to be found.

          Another problem is the religiosity of Americans (put web address here).  Most Americans have grown up with mental programming that makes them regard all religions as fundamentally good.  Few make the effort to learn the truths about Islam in part because they regard Islam as one of the great religions of the world, thus it could not possibly be bad.  Most in government harbor such deformed thinking, including the president of the USA.  Islam gets pass after pass.

                   Liberals adore equality.  Theirs is egalitarianism.  It is equality, not under the law, but in behavior and result.  No extenuation circumstances, no facts of reality, and no applications of reason can be permitted to dilute this equality.  Thus people who vow to destroy us get the same rights and benefits as the patriotic population.  A small example concerns the town of Hamtramck, Michigan, where Muslims played the town council like a Wurlitzer to get permission to assault the ears of the townspeople with the cacophony of the muezzin call to prayer over giant loudspeakers six times a day, compared to a time or two a week for church bells.  The list goes on and on.

          Islamists see the profound cultural weakness and poison of “political correctness” and multiculturalism.  These people, who abhor the concept of rights and who have no rights for anyone in Islamia, play Americans like fools to get their “rights.”  Were the question one of “rights,” there would be few questions.  They see how government uses the anti-concept of “rights” to mean “entitlements.”  Islamists barge into line and belly up to the entitlement bar.  The anti-American liberals rush them to the front of each line for preferential treatment, in schools, laws, government dispensations, welfare, etc.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

The list seems endless.

          As a result of all of these processes going on, the covert jihad marches onward, meeting no resistance.  Should one of the indigenous population object or get in the way, the government steps in to put the Muslim in front of the line.

          Where does it end?  If unopposed long enough, Muslims will reach critical mass and take over, a la Hitler.  Hitler was elected, by the “democratic” process of voting.  Not a shot was fired.

Islamists know that they must build up an electorate, and then move in for the kill.  Shortly thereafter, their Koran will replace our Constitution, which Muslims believe that we, the indigenous population, won’t defend.

Lawrence Auster, in How to Defeat Jihad in America , in Front Page Magazine, 26 May 2004, offers valuable thoughts and recommendations.  He quotes Robert S Leiken of the Nixon Center:  “The sole source of the growth of jihadism and terrorism in the West is Muslim immigration.”  After elaborating about this problem, Auster goes on to make five recommendations for stopping and then reversing the Islamicization of America.

·         End all mass immigration of Moslems into the United States, whether from Moslem countries or elsewhere.  He would admit Muslims highly selectively, those who are compatible with the rational self-interest of the USA.  Extended families would not be waived through any longer.

·         Deport all Moslem illegal aliens.  Existing laws must be enforced and reinforced with modern technology to know exactly how long an alien has been in country and where this person is.  That would purge newer incomers, and the threat would cause a mass exodus of those already in country in violation of laws and regulations.  I would add that all illegals go into internment for quick deportation from their status of being in custody.  We need a tough-as-nails and completely non-compassionate attitude toward illegals.

·         Deport all legal resident aliens with ties or loyalties to radical Islam.  None are citizens, and all who fulfill this criterion are enemies of America.  They go into detention until deportation, which should happen quickly.

·         Remove the citizenship of and deport all naturalized and native-born citizens who are supporter of jihad.  To quote Auster, “We have no obligation to harbor within our country people who are religiously committed to the destruction of our country.”

·         Publicly renounce and abjure multiculturalism as a societal philosophy.  Yahoo!  The reinstitution of the concept and practices of the Rights of Man will wipe out multiculturalism.  We are better.  Our culture and civilization are better.  Let us selfishly uphold this.  It is in our rational self-interest.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

 Review:  UNHOLY ALLIANCE:

Radical Islam and the American Left

 

By David Horowitz

(Regnery Books, N.Y.; 2004; ISBN:  0-89526-076-X)

 

 

        What happened to the Nazis and Nazism after the collapse of the Third Reich?  Did they go away, or just go underground?  What happened to communists and communism after the collapse of the USSR?

 

        David Horowitz*, in Unholy Alliance, tells us.

 

        He does not address the Nazis as much he does the Reds, but his presentation allows inclusion of both.

 

        And the answer is that their intellectual heirs are living and well in America and Europe.  Just as the Nazis and Communists in Pre-Nazi Germany were two sides of the same coin, so they are here as well.  Remember that “NAZI” stands for NSDAP, which means “National SOCIALIST German Workers Party,” and remember that fascism, including its Nazi variant, and communism come from the same intellectual root stock:  SOCIALISM.

 

        All of these virulent socialists have reemerged from the collapse of the old left and old communism to form what Mr. Horowitz properly calls the “neocommunists,” or “neocomms.”  The neocomms, however, have devolved from their pining for the new world order of old communism to raw nihilism—destruction of everything.  Their goal is to destroy America and everything it stands for, and now they have new partners.

 

        The new partners are the Islamic jihadists, who want exactly the same thing:  The destruction of America and all it stands for.  This is the hardcore FIFTH COLUMN, with many strap-hangers along for the ride.  This is the UNHOLY ALLIANCE David Horowitz presents.  And, hold your hats, the Unholy Alliance is WINNING.  If we don’t get off our derrieres, we are going to be herded into a totalitarian state worse than any of those in the 20th century, and we will be bowing to Mecca five times a day.

 

        The Unholy Alliance members are organized, and they are speaking with one voice, from one sheet of paper, as the expression goes.  We Americans are not organized, nor are we speaking from the same sheet of paper.  We are divided, in part by the effect of our own ignorance, direct effects philosopher John Dewey unleashed on American education (from K-12 and through all of the teachers colleges, and into the university system), and the total takeover of academia and all media by neocomms.  In short, we are facing a principled and consistent leftist alliance combating US, an under-principled and very inconsistent America and West.  If we do not become fully principled, and very consistent in their application, we will lose to this new Fifth Column.

 

        Unholy Alliance rips the scab off the neocomm-jihadist fusion and exposes it to the light of truth in a short, easy to digest, and potent book.  You cannot read this book and stick your head in the sand again.  You cannot read this book and try to find middle ground or otherwise compromise with your destroyers.  You can read this book and get up fighting mad and ready to fight effectively for America.

 

        David Horowitz grew up in a household with American communist parents, and he became a communist.  In the 1960s, he became one of the neocommunists and remained one into the 1970s until he got a blinding flash of reason and realized the logical consequences of his allegiance and behavior.  Because of his past, however, he knows these people in and out.  He can tell the tales better than anyone else around.  When David speaks, we should listen.

 

American intellectuals embraced communism and the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s with a blind adulation that makes me want to vomit.  World War II killed communism as a movement, and Stalin’s excesses grossed out even the communists and comsymps or fellow travelers.  Communism after WWII ceased as a movement.  Subsequently, the failures of socialism around the world became obvious even to the left, and it died also as a movement but not as a force still exerting influence by default.  The death of old communism left many ideologically homeless.  These homeless did not blame the failed ideologies at all.  As Ed Asner said on the radio, they said that the practitioners had failed, not the ideology—the ideology had not been practiced correctly, they firmly believed and believe.  This is a major thought disorder neocomms have in common, and they cannot be persuaded from it by reason any more than a schizophrenic can be reasoned out of schizophrenia.

 

        These ideologically homeless coalesced into the New Left, or neocommunists.  They retained their love for totalitarian (“utopian”) ideas and their hatred for America and capitalism.  Their practice became “creative destruction,” a concept stolen from capitalism and perverted to mean “nihilism.”  They hate the present and live in the future.  They want to destroy the present world.  They hate reality—the world as it IS.  They actually believe that they have to destroy America to make it well, which is warmed over Marxism.  Believe me, there is nothing original with these people.  Their primary goal is NIHILISM, destruction for the sake of destruction, sweetened with some pie-in-the-sky future fantasizing about eventually finding their utopia of no needs, no wants, no differences, no poverty, no wealth, no disruptive progress, and just static ecstasy— like Islam’s Paradise.  For now, they want nihilism, hating the good for being good, like Islam.

 

        Neocomms began populating academia in the 1970s, becoming a major influence in academia in the 1980s.  By the turn of the 1990s they had taken over the academic fountainhead.  It was they who launched “political correctness” and “multiculturalism.”  It was they who played the race and gender cards in every contest, no matter how inappropriate.  It has been they who took over the minds of the "humanities" graduates, journalists, and politicians.  They have successfully bullied the morally uncertain, who now bend obsequiously to political correctness,  to get their way.  That is why we have this epistemological, moral, and political relativism mess today.

 

        Neocomms really believe that they had been given a green light during the tenure of the Clinton administration, when they felt their kind had come into their own, in and out of office.  They proliferated during this period, inserting themselves into every nook and cranny in America that they could.  (A Kerry presidency would have utterly revitalized them, and they would have had carte blanche to damage us terribly during his presidency).  They took over the Democrat Party and began converting it to what it appears to be today which looks more day by day like America’s Nazi party, replete with Brown Shirts and Brown Skirts,  even involving a number of rank and file Democrats who became “Kristallnachters” during the 2004 election season, and even after the election.  They have sought and crave power wherever it could and can be begged, bought, or stolen.  Like jihadists, they need raw physical power to survive.

 

        Meanwhile, in 1979, Khomeini in Iran launched the jihadism we face today, financed by Iranian oil, aided and abetted by the Sunni Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, with the consent and funding of the Saudi regime.  Islamic nihilism burst onto the world.

 

        Since 11 September 2001, the neocomms and the jihadists in America fused to achieve the same symbiotic end.  The two are almost indistinguishable in content, rhetoric, and behavior.  As a result, we have a ferociously dangerous FIFTH COLUMN in America and throughout the West.  We have organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, National Lawyers Guild, and Center for Constitutional Rights, ANSWER, Not In My Name, Code Pink, AFCSME and other unions, and many others, linking with the United Nations, Council for American-Islamic Relations, Muslim Brotherhood, Muslim Students Association, Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and  many others.  Some of these names are from the book, and others I have added because of their obvious neocomm-jihadist orientation.  Joining them are strap-hanger Fifth Columnist comsymps in the Democrat Party such as Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, and the Democrat Party dumpling, Michael Moore, as well as almost half the U. S. Senate.  The bulk of American journalism—print and broadcast--vibrates in sympathy and support, and almost all of American education at all levels dances to the neocomms-jihadist tunes.  This is not “conspiracy theorizing.”  It is fact, and Horowitz proves the case.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

 Their plan is first to paralyze America with legal and moral-appearing means.  Then they will move in to kill the paralyzed beast of America.

 

        Mr. Horowitz makes the case and names the names.  He threatens this fifth column so much that they have launched a campaign to discredit him and this book.  Just that behavior alone should make you run out and buy the book.

 

        The final chapter concerns secessionism.  To the neocomms-jihadists, the goal is to destroy patriotism so that the citizens can secede from the ideas of and the physical existence of America.  Read it for yourself.  Mr. Horowitz quotes these people liberally here, and throughout the book, because they mince no words about their ideas and intents.

 

        We who love individual freedom, capitalism, and the Constitution of the United States have a clear obligation to defend our values.  We start by erasing ignorance and sharpening our awareness.  While doing this, we become activists.  We start pushing back--in the press, on the air, and in every way we can.

 

        We fight back with the correct intellectual ammunition.  Our ideas are better, and we must make them highly visible and dominant.  This book is a valuable piece of that intellectual ammunition.  Never forget that they are winning, NOT BECAUSE THEIR IDEAS ARE BETTER, but because they are being consistent.  Our ideas are better, and with consistent application of reason, we will win.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

EXPOSING AMERICA'S FIFTH COLUMN:
NAZISM, COMMUNISM, AND ISLAM
PART I

 

Less Than Three Decades after Weimar

 

        Come with me, back to 1959-1960, when I was in college.  I was given an opportunity to sneak a peek at Weimar (a name taken from the German governmental and cultural period between the end of World War I and the final conversion to Nazism) culture in America.  Our college president bought in what he called the “avant-garde,” particularly in the arts, i.e., a glimpse of what art and thought would be like in the near future.  At the time, I was much too naïve and unsophisticated to analyze conceptually what I was seeing:

 

    * A philosopher with a lot of initials and possibly the last name of Schiller spoke at convocation.  He was pridefully and militantly unintelligible.  Nothing he said made any sense.  Although naïve, I did not make the usual mistake of assuming he was “too deep” for me to understand.  I knew that he simply made no sense, period.
    * A famous inventor spoke in neologisms.  Years later, when in psychiatry residency, I reflected on this inventor’s talk, and I was struck by how similar was his language to that of a schizophrenic.  Eventually, I was told by a colleague who professed to know that the inventor was, in fact, schizophrenic.
    * Plays in the college theatre dispensed with every rule and custom of drama in order to be “free” from displaying anything recognizable, thus understandable.  No two productions of the same play were alike.  All of them were, however, very crude and vulgar, and nothing about them made any sense.
    * Then came the piece de resistance as new, great music.  Two men almost destroyed a grand piano.  They beat on the keys, raked the strings, pounded the piano case, and slammed the bench lid repetitively while also using sundry other objects to make what I could only describe as noise.  It was discordant and cacophonous in the extreme.  But, you had to see the accompanying dance group.  Their “dance” was “choreographed” to the “music.”  Dancers used “profound symbols” while running about the stage in a manner reminiscent of chickens whose necks have been wrung.  Their “symbols” consisted of boat cushions and pieces of picket fence.  The dancers were painted gray and wore shredded gray costumes.  They danced under dark gray-blue light so that their individuality faded away.

 

The music and dance were the last of this “glimpse into the future” that I could tolerate.  During the music and dance presentation, I left.  I had seen a living hell of complete intellectual bankruptcy—of nihilism--and I wanted none of it.  I went to an empty student union to join a fellow science major.  I tried to describe what I had seen, but I convulsed in laughter for a very long time instead, guffawing as I had never done before or since.

 

I am proud of myself.  I knew no philosophy then, but I had soundly rejected American Weimar culture as absurd.  In retrospect, however, I now realize that this so-called “avant-garde” exposure was coming just 30 years after the peaking of Weimar culture.  It was coming just 14 years after the end of a world-wide effort to destroy the Third Reich.  It was just one year away from the era of the 1960s.

 

What I saw in 1959 at my college, and much, much worse, you, my fellow taxpayer, and I must pay for today through the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the hosts of “educational” and “research” government grants.  The principles behind what was avant-garde then are now revered among the “intelligentsia” as the ideal:  nihilism.

 

The Weimar Republic, Weimar Germany, and Weimar culture disappeared when Hitler became dictator of Germany in 1933.  The ideas of Weimar did not go away any more than Nazism as an ideology went away in May of 1945.  Both came to America.

 

So, here in 2004, let us take a cultural snapshot:

 

·     Painting:  All conceivable means of throwing and streaking paint on canvas, as long as thought is not involved; animals “painting”; total disregard given to new artists whose works reflect objectivity and values.

·     Sculpture:  Randomly placed junk, welded in place; human figures too crude even for prehistoric artists.

·     Literature:  A wasteland, a value blank.

·     Music:  Nihilistic hip-hop, gangsta rap, heavy metal, grunge and other productions of noise, made tolerable only by listening while in a drug-induced fog.

·     Movies:  Rare good ones vastly outnumbered by a plethora of special effects/action/violence, without plot or values, spiced up with sex+sex+sex+foul language+subhuman behaviors by nihilistic anti-heroes extolling raw hedonism.

·    Television:  Some good dramas outnumbered by anti-valued, so-called “reality” programs and endless banality.

·    Computer games:  Raw hedonism of the extremely nihilistic variety involving rape, violent murdering, and destruction for the sake of destruction.

 

And, let us not leave out social institutions:

 

·     Law:  Activist judges “creatively interpreting” law and legal principles in order to perform social engineering by nullifying values and valuers, particularly on the Right.

·     Special interests:  For example, the American Civil Liberties Union representing anyone as long as the issue is some attack on the values of America and Americans.

·     Primary and secondary education:  All out war on American values, families, cognition, and morality, using all sorts of tactics including banning of Christmas and Halloween, but not banning extreme violence, gang behaviors, rapes, drugs, extortion and theft.

·    Universities and colleges:  Ceaseless war on all forms of achievement such as capitalism, individualism, rights, knowledge, America and its institutions, and even successful countries such as Israel.

·    Paris Hilton as cultural poster child.

 

What I witnessed back in college and today is the culture-wide phenomena of the inmates having escaped, after locking the rest of us into the asylum.  The same phenomena are literally permanently “deforming” America—but to what end?

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

A New Civil War Approaches

 

        It should frighten the living hell out of you to realize that, in America, right now, you are living in a cultural milieu horribly similar to that of the Weimar Republic, which made the ascendancy of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis inevitable.  If this does not frighten you, then ask yourself whether you can afford to remain ignorant any longer.

 

        America’s culture today comes from its fifth column, made up of America’s Left and its more recent allies, the jihadists.  This fifth column intends to bring down America.  If you do not understand these groups and processes, you will live to see America’s collapse and its conversion to a totalitarian state, quite possibly even an Islamic one.

 

Fortunately, there is a cure.

 

        In this article, I emphasize the book, Ominous Parallels:  The End of Freedom in America (by Leonard Peikoff; Stein and Day; New York; 1982; ISBN 0-451-62210-3).  The author is a professional philosopher with a gift that enables him to speak and write so that intelligent people, not formally trained in philosophy, can understand him and apply what he says directly to their lives.

 

This truly great book spells out what happened to Germany and above all, WHY it happened.  It also spells out how and WHY America has been following Germany’s path and grows dangerously close to the immediate pre-Hitler period of the Weimar Republic.  It is these “whys” that make this book uniquely and extremely valuable, and it is the quality of its ideas and their presentation that separates it from all other books which have unsuccessfully tried to account for the reasons for the rise of Nazism.

 

The current Democrat Party of the USA, straight out of Ominous Parallels, has bedded and wedded the new totalitarians, the ones described so well by David Horowitz recently in Unholy Alliance:  Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery; New York; 2004; ISBN 0-89526-076-X).  [On this website, I have recently reviewed the Horowitz book.  BOTH BOOKS COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER WELL.]

 

Pre-election and post-election 2004, mini-instances of “Kristallnacht” (Crystal Night, when in 1938, Nazis destroyed stores of Jews, breaking the plate glass store fronts) broke out daily in America, and have been perpetrated almost 100% by Democrat Party supporters.  All of these actions protested the election of President Bush and those who supported his reelection:  campus demonstrations, protest marches, vandalism, personal assaults, shutting down speakers as well as calls for revolution, destruction, and, in effect, “jihad.”  These new totalitarians want to take by force what they cannot yet win by the ballot.  Their violence gets worse by the year as the nihilism originating from the university campuses diffuses throughout faculties and administrators, and is fully accepted among impulse-dominated students who are willing to vandalize, threaten, and physically attack other students who disagree with them.  Having learned nothing from the 2004 election, Democrats are calling for much more of this nihilism which the neocommunists, who dominate that party, have been inflicting on America.

 

        Some cultural commentators have referred to the essence of today’s cultural theme as “nihilism.”  Literally, “nihil” means “nothing,” and “nihilism” refers to an ideology embracing nothing, i.e., nothing-ism.  The Encarta Dictionary gives four definitions:  (1) total rejection of social mores, particularly morality and religion; (2) belief that nothing is worthwhile, life as pointless and human values as worthless; (3) disbelief in objective truth; and (4) belief in destruction of authority, the belief that all established authority is corrupt and must be destroyed in order to rebuild a just society.

 

These are accurate statements about nihilism except for the one referring to the honorable motive of rebuilding a “just society.”  Nihilists have no concept of “justice,” and the society they envision has nothing in common with justice, fairness, freedom or any related concept.  What they do is destroy.  They do not want to build anything because they are not capable of building anything; they do not want anything constructive in life to exist.

 

Examples of nihilism abound.  Here are just a few.  Singers at glamorous awards galas routinely show up looking like homeless bums needing new clothes, baths, and shaves.  Even, Johnny Cash, an unquestionably patriotic American, in his famous ballad, “Folsom Prison Blues,” expressed nihilism, about the man who “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”  Democrats and the Left do not want our soldiers to win in Iraq; the journalistic media love only bad news about the war, the economy, or anything else going wrong for anyone.  The Left do not want America to be productive, successful, creative or free.  They do not want citizens to keep the money they earn.  In the 2004 presidential election campaign, the Democrat Party and its supporters from every walk of life manifested such extreme nihilism that it caught the attention of every commentator, each of whom could only describe it, because none could explain it.  The predominant attitude among Democrats and Democrat supporters was hatred, hatred for Bush and all Bush stood for, even the fundamental principle upon which America was founded.  They even hated their own candidate, John Kerry, but they accepted this inept senator, candidate, and human in hopes he and they could destroy Bush and Bush-supporters.  They did not want just to defeat Bush; no, indeed, they wanted to DESTROY Bush and what he symbolized:  AMERICA.

 

American colleges and universities breed and protect nihilism.  This is hatred of the good for being good and the overpowering desire to destroy something valued (the good) just to destroy it.  THAT IS NIHILISM.  The examples are almost endless these days.

 

        Islam is nothing if it is not extreme nihilism.  Islamists want to destroy the world and rule what is left, in whatever state of degradation it will be found after jihad.  THAT IS NIHILISM.

 

        What are the Republicans doing about this virulently destructive, anti-American war being waged on America by the nihilists?  Like the Social Democrats of the Weimar government, they are trying to compromise and “make nice.”  They are paralyzed by their own desire to compromise, and by political correctness and multiculturalism.  The latter two, as Horowitz points out, were started and spread here in America by the Left.  The Republicans feel like Americans and they want to be Americans, but the principles they fall back on are those of faith, which are not sufficient in the struggle against the Left.  Faith does not permit them to understand either the American Left or the Islamists.  Their militantly anti-philosophical folksiness blinds them to the former, and their reliance on faith over reason blinds them to the latter.  They are morally uncertain in the face of their adversaries who are morally certain, although very wrong and very evil.  Conservatives, who make up most of the Republican Party, are engaged solely in a holding action against the unholy alliance between Islam and the Left.  They have been retreating steadily because they either know how to win and won’t, or because they do not know how to win and refuse to find out.

 

        America may well be headed for another civil war.  For sure, some of us will not surrender this country to either the Left or to the Islamists.  The best possible outcome of such a civil war would be a restorative Second American Revolution, but that requires a level of philosophical sophistication like that of our Founders.

 

The worst possible outcome would be the establishment of a totalitarian state in America.  That could happen here (recall Sinclair Lewis’, It Can’t Happen Here), and, if it does, it will be based on the principles and practices existing in American culture right now.  Not one new principle would be needed; they go way back--these are the same principles which made Hitler possible.

 

        America right now stands exactly where Weimar Germany did just before Hitler took over.  The equivalents of his brown-shirted Sturmabteilungen (SA) are on every campus in America.  Had John Kerry been elected, these “SA” might well have concluded that they once again had the “green light,” just as they did in the Clinton era, as described by Horowitz.  Certainly it is likely that they would have been willing to don American equivalents of the black shirts of the Schutzstaffeln (SS).  If the cultural drift is not stopped soon, these equivalents of the SA will “don black shirts” in the foreseeable future.

 

David Horowitz writes about these new SA and SS of America as “neocommunists” or “neocomms,” while Leonard Peikoff writes about Weimar Germany pre-Nazis.  Please note that the relationship between these groups is the fact that they are two sides of the same coin.  To illustrate, one German writer compared Nazis to beefsteaks:  brown on the outside and red on the inside.  Nazis and communists were, and are, very much alike, having no fundamental differences, only superficial differences in style.  Hitler knew how close the Nazis and communists were, and upon taking power, he immediately ordered that any and all communists seeking to join the Nazis be immediately admitted to membership.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

The Meaning of Nazism

 

        “Nazi” is a shorthand designation for National Socialist German Workers Party, or NSDAP, as one sees on many of their banners.  Communism is also socialism.  The socialist axis spawns Nazis, all other fascists, communists, social democrats, and those with similar names.  With these variants of socialism, it is like looking at the same cake, with each slice having a different color icing.  Too many people think of Nazism as totalitarianism of the right and communism as totalitarianism of the left.  IT IS ALL LEFT, BABY!

 

Peikoff reminds us that Nazis were not a tribe of prehistoric savages.  “Their crimes were the official, legal acts and policies of modern Germany—an educated, industrialized, civilized Western European nation, a nation renowned throughout the world for the luster of its intellectual and cultural achievements.”  (15)  Furthermore, the Nazis were elected by Germans of every socio-economic and educational level:  “The Nazis did not gain power against the country’s wishes.”  (15)

 

        Peikoff quotes from a leading spokesman of fascism, Alfredo Rocco, “For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.”  (17)  This could have been said on the floor of the U. S. Senate or in the 2004 presidential primaries, or, indeed, in any primary, secondary, or university educational institution today, as an ideal to be pursued.  The only difference would be the substitution of some fuzzy term or phrase for “Fascism.” Fascism is socialism, and “’Socialism’ for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.”  (19)

 

Intellectual Roots

 

        How, then, did Germany, this “land of poets and philosophers,” come to accept National Socialism so easily?  “The Nazis could not have won the support of the German masses but for the systematic preaching of a complex array of theories, doctrines, opinions, notions, and beliefs.  And not one of their central beliefs was original…  [T]he men in the streets heard and recognized and sympathized with and embraced those beliefs, and voted for their exponents.”  (22)

 

Germany was indeed ideologically “ripe.”  All of the necessary intellectual groundwork had been laid.  Nazism came from one source:  Philosophy.  The same philosophy which made Nazism possible has largely become America’s philosophy, progressively replacing the philosophy of our founding.  Joining forces with these American Nazis and neocomms are the Islamists.  The many comments by Islamic leaders favoring Kerry, including Osama Bin Laden, should come as no surprise.  The philosophy of Islam is super-imposable over Nazism; thus, it is also no surprise that historically, Islam has had a strong affinity for Nazism.  Saddam Hussein studied Hitler’s Germany (as well as Stalin’s USSR), and his Ba’ath Party was patterned on Nazism, as all Ba’ath Parties have been.

 

        Dr. Peikoff disabuses readers of erroneous ideas about philosophy and its value:

 

    * “To understand the state of a society, one must discover the extent to which a given philosophy penetrates its spirit and institutions.  On this basis, one can then explain a society’s collapse—or, if it still has a chance, forecast its future.  This is what can make intelligible the fact of Hitler’s rise, and the possibility of America’s fall.”  (140)
    * “Because philosophy deals with broad abstractions, most people regard the subject as detached from life.  They regard philosophy as they would a political-party platform—as a set of floating generalities unrelated to action, generalities which are part ritualistic piety, part rationalization or cover-up, and part rhetorical hot air.”  (139)
    * “In every field, the source [of developments] of the choices men make, which rest ultimately on their basic choices.  Knowingly or not, those choices flow from men’s basic ideas and values.  The science of basic ideas is philosophy.”  (Emphasis mine, 139]
    * “If a man is skeptical about the role of philosophy in life, [l]et him observe the concretes of his society’s cultural life—its politics, its economics, its education, its youth movements, its art and religion and science.”  (139)

 

The intellectual chain of transmission to Nazi Germany began with Plato, then Kant, on to Hegel, and finally to Hitler.  These thinkers were connected by many lesser links in the long chain.

 

Without a doubt, the major blame goes to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who can be accurately portrayed as the destroyer of the modern world.  He was the third of the great philosophers who developed full systematic philosophies.  The systematic philosophers have had the greatest influence throughout history.  Plato and Aristotle were the only others before Kant.

 

Kantian apologists abound, trying to make people think Kant was a great and benevolent man, but he must be known by the products of his philosophy.  Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are his historical monuments, the fullest logical consequences of his philosophy; they were created by Kant’s intellectual descendents.  Hegel, another major German philosopher, also played a very visible role in Marxism which was a part of Nazism.

 

        Kant launched the most successful assault on reason ever conceived by mankind.  Kant’s explicit intent for destroying reason was to “save faith.”  He was as effective at turning men’s minds against themselves as are the Islamists, and his intellectual descendents took his rejection of reason all the way to 20th century totalitarianism and the present state of dominant European and American intellectual and cultural ideas.  The “neocommunists,” about whom Horowitz writes so eloquently, are also Kant’s intellectual heirs, and they are as much Nazis as they are communists.  Cultural nihilism traces right back to Kant.  Kant was German, and Germany adopted the essentials of his system.  Weimar Culture was a full manifestation of Kantianism.

 

        Nazis specifically and explicitly attacked reason.  They wanted obedience, not thought.  Peikoff quotes Hitler, “We must distrust the intelligence and the conscience and must place our trust in our instincts.”  (46)  Hitler regarded the general population (“the masses”) with the same disdain that America’s various Leftists do:  “The masses are like an animal that obeys its instincts.  The do not reach conclusions by reasoning.”  (47)

 

        To unseat reason, Kant, much like Plato had done over 2000 years before, divided reality into knowable and unknowable realms.  He designated the world which no one could know to be the real world, similar to Plato’s world of forms.  The reality which humans know and live in, Kant declared to be unreal, a fiction created by the minds of people.  Thus, Kant invalidated man’s mind because mankind could know only the “world of appearance,” which was not real, and could never know the “real world” which was unknowable except by faith, not reason.  If trying to make sense of Kant’s nonsense gives you a headache, remember that Kant has given the entire civilized world two centuries of intractable migraines of the intellect, and these notions continue to the present.  Kantianism, however, is a spent force intellectually; it persists and continues its destruction only by passive acceptance by means of default.  Fortunately, the world is ready for the antidote.

 

        Kant reduced mankind to the level of the mindless and unreasoning, a status known by every savage and every devout Muslim.

 

Kant’s ethics became Nazi ethics--line, chapter, and verse.  Nazi ethics can be heard on any street in America today.  Here are some samples:  From Mein Kampf, “[T]he wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit…” i.e., a human must “…renounce putting forward his personal opinion and interests and sacrifice both…”  (68)  Said a popular German slogan of the time:   “Gemeinnutz geht von Eigennutz” = “The common good comes before private good.”  (69)

 

“Sacrifice” does not refer to some action taken by others to achieve some good end.  It means forsaking something of higher value for something of lesser value.  To illustrate, the expression, “The pain of sacrifice,” has the meaning it does because giving up the more valuable thing hurts.  In exactly the same way, “altruism” in its philosophical meaning does not mean helping one’s fellow man out of one's goodness—no one could object to that, except nihilists.  “Altruism” here refers to the obligatory self-sacrificial service to others as an ethical primary, including giving up that of greater value to others under force—this is the ethics of totalitarianism, not fellowship.

 

        Nazism rose, not because of numbers and actions of criminals, writes Dr. Peikoff.  “The reason [for the rise of Hitler] was the millions of non-thugs in the land of poets and philosophers, the decent, law-abiding Germans who found hope and inspiration in Hitler, the legions of unhappy, abstemious, duty-bound men and women who condemned what they saw as the selfishness of the new Weimar Republic, and who were eager to take part in the new moral crusade that Hitler promised to lead.  The reason was the “good Germans”—above all, their concept of “the good.”  (70)

cont'd