More flim flam from another apologist of Islam. We are not presented with a truthful analysis, even though the author appears to acknowledge the nastiness of the two major threads of Islam — he presents them as new innovations, reactive to the nationalistic and communistic threads which briefly ran through the Islamic world in the early to mid 20th century. This analysis is simply more obscurantism designed to muddle and confuse.
To wit:
“Ever since its historic revolution of 1978-1979, Iran has emerged as an invigorating force behind ascending Shiism. But it has also reached emotionally and deeply into the much larger community of Sunnis that forms a majority of the 1.2 billion Muslims.”
This is an oft repeated and erroneous meme. The resurgence of Shia Islam in Iran and the ascendancy of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia are not a retooling of Arab nationalism, or responses to communism and socialism — they are the direct effect of trillions of petrodollars flowing into Muslim coffers which began in the 1960s and 1970s. The dabbling within the Islamic world with various revolutionary strands such as fascist nationalism (Arab Nazism), socialism, and communism were simply very brief respites in Islam’s long carreer of eternal Jihad. Once dollars flowed again into the withered desert of Islam, a world which had nearly turned to dust after the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate, it was inevitable that Islam would rear its ugly head and wage jihad again.
This erroneous theme is repeated again here: “The ayatollahs refashioned a crumbling revolutionary world of leftist-socialist Arab radicalism into an attractive pseudo-Islamic package. “ (*Can the author kindly remind us again about what was “attractive” about this “pseudo-Islamic package”? Can the author kindly remind us again about what is “pseudo” about the Iranian “Islamic package”? It is the truest manifestation of Shiite Islam the world has seen in centuries. The Saudi flavor of Islam is the truest form of their strand of Islam the world has seen in centuries. There’s nothing whatsoever “pseudo” about either…)
And again:
“The model [Iran's Shiite Islam] is pragmatically revolutionary rather than theologically fanatic. It is in fact a tool to renegotiate Iran’s geopolitical repositioning rather than a heavenly quest.”
Then why the complete immersion in traditional and fundamental Islamic theology and rhetoric? Why the constant exhortations to Allah, and to the life of Islam’s heinous “prophet”? Why the adherence to the most vicious forms of Sharia implementation? Iran and Saudi Arabia aren’t “revolutionary” movements hiding behind the veneer of Islam. This is Islam unmasked — Islam revealed.
While the fascistic and nazi-like strands of Islam certainly bear resemblances to these various hideous manifestations of communism or nationalist totalitarian fascism, (Nazism), it is only a comparison or resemblance that is borne. Islam is a religious ideological incarnation or form of these usually secular forms of terroristic tyranny. It is therefore actually far far worse than either. While the world (including the Islamic world) dabbled with secular forms of communism and various strains of supremacist Nazism in the 20th Century, Islam alone has maintained a 1400 year record of this kind of tyranny. Jihad is a permanent and intrinsic part of Islam, as is the Sharia law underpinning Islam. There’s no way to divorce them from each other.
Youssef M. Ibrahim’s proscription for the West is to aid the “eminently negotiable” Mullahs to defeat the implacable Saudis.
They are both nightmares which need destroying. Using them against each other is a great idea, but not to enable one to dominate the other. The strands of Islam must be allowed to wage their Jihad against each other while doing everything in our power to isolate and contain Muslims away from the West. We do not have a dog in this fight, but should aid whoever is the underdog to encourage more damage and more siphoning off of resources which otherwise might be used to wage Jihad against us.
