What does the Palestinian jihad against Israel have to do with allowing illegal migrants to remain in Los Angeles? On the face of it, absolutely nothing, and yet there the jihadis are, out burning down the City of Angels along with their leftist allies. The immediate explanation for this is that both leftists and jihadis have a common enemy — the United States of America — and while that is certainly true, this is much more than just an alliance of convenience. What we are seeing in Los Angeles is just the latest manifestation of a deep affinity between leftists and jihadis.
The pro-Hamas contingent appears to be well represented in L.A. One photo shows a masked man with a Hamas armband and a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine headband, waving a Mexican flag next to a car that had been graffitied all over with leftist slogans and set on fire. In a video, rioters sporting keffiyehs throw burning material from an overpass onto police cars below, trying to set them on fire. Another keffiyeh-wearing rioter says that the U.S. is the “enemy” and that Los Angeles should burn down.
The deeper reason why jihadis as well as leftists are out on the streets of Los Angeles is that both rely on terror as the source of their power. Maximilien Robespierre made this reliance explicit during the French Revolution, when he said in a Feb. 1794 speech: “If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.”
The import of saying that terror was an “emanation of virtue” was that the French people had to be terrorized into doing the bidding of the French Revolutionary government. They had to be simply too scared not to obey. This, as George Orwell so vividly illustrated in "1984," is the hallmark of leftist totalitarian governments.
The principal architect of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, V. I. Lenin, said much the same thing: “We stand for organized terror – this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal’s own confession.”
It's the same story with Islam. Islam is likewise built on terror, contrary to the fashionable Western wishful thinking about how Islamic terrorists have hijacked and/or misunderstood the religion of peace. The Qur’an tells Muslims to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60), but that is only the beginning. The Muslim book’s entire appeal to the human race is on the basis of terror: you must believe, or you will suffer the painful tortures of hell. In the New Testament, the angel of the Lord came to the shepherds who were keeping watch over their flocks by night and said: “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.” (Like 2:10-11) In the Qur’an, the tidings are of an altogether different kind: “No, but those who disbelieve will deny, and Allah knows best what they are hiding. So give them tidings of a painful doom.” (84:22-24).
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A pious Muslim believes and obeys Allah because “those who disbelieve, theirs will be an awful doom.” (35:7) Non-Muslims submit to the hegemony of the Muslims and Islamic law because if they do not “pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (9:29), their “contract of protection” can be revoked and they can be killed. Women submit to men because the Qur’an tells men to “beat” women from whom they “fear disobedience” (4:34). In every relationship, every interaction, there is terror, and that terror is the element that compels obedience, just as in leftist regimes.
In Los Angeles, leftists who see the destruction of America and the “liberation” of “Palestine” as great Marxist struggles of the oppressed against the oppressor are working together with Muslims who see the destruction of Israel as a grand jihad and fulfillment of Allah’s command to “drive them out from where they drove you out.” (Qur’an 2:191) Islamic jihadists and leftists love each other so much because they both favor the same weapons, and have the same goal: a docile population too thoroughly terrorized to dare to disobey. That’s what both groups are hoping to get as a result of their rioting in Los Angeles.
