The terrorist essence of Islam

Goneril in King Lear, described in Shakespeare’s lines in the previous entry, is an active evildoer and wielder of terror against her own society, not merely, like so many of the contemporary West, one who has turned away from her origins and so let evildoers and terrorists have power. That yielding to terror on the part of its victims is the secret of Islam’s advance. As David Kupelian writes at WorldNetDaily,

On one level, terrorism works by simply causing us so much pain, suffering and dread of future terror that we eventually weaken and give in to the terrorists’ demands. But the ultimate goal of terrorism is to capture our hearts and minds—to convert us.

What? How can terrorizing us transform our attitudes in favor of the terrorists’ viewpoint? Wouldn’t we recoil in horror and, if anything, move farther away from sympathy toward the perpetrators? Not necessarily.

Remember, militant Muslims “convert” individuals to Islam by threat of death. Why shouldn’t they try the same tactic on entire societies? [Emphasis added.]

Stop and consider what happens when we’re intimidated and frightened by terrorism, or even the threat of it. Wonder of wonders, some of us start to sympathize with our enemy.

There’s a funny thing about appeasement. It’s hard to give in to evil without first agreeing with that evil, at least a little.

Kupelian’s observations crystallize for us the centrality of terror in Islam. Terror is not just one technique among others that some jihadists use to spread Islam. Terror is the very essence of the way Islam spreads itself. What is the mandate laid by Allah on all Muslims? To convert the world to Islam, if not by persuasion, then by force. What does conversion by force mean? It means that Muslims say to non-Muslims: convert or die. In the manner of a highwayman pointing a gun at his victim or a rapist holding a knife to his victim’s throat, the representatives of the religion of peace say to the infidels, “Give us what we want (your conversion to Islam, or, alternatively your acceptance of dhimmitude), or we will kill you.” In saying this, the Muslims are following the example of Allah himself, who pronounces the same bloodcurdling threat on nearly every page of the Koran: “Yield to me and to my Prophet, or I will give you a horrible death (followed by an eternity of torment).” Kupelian’s own great grandfather, a Protestant leader in Turkey, was massacred along with 60 others when they refused to convert to Islam on threat of instant death.

Such actual acts of murder against earlier targets who refused to convert voluntarily teach later targets that the threat is serious. Yielding starts to seem more attractive than death. This yielding, as Kupelian shows, does not have to be literal conversion or a formal state of dhimmitude. It can be the informal state of dhimmitude that is also known as liberalism or appeasement, consisting of a willingness to side with Muslims against one’s own society, to go along more and more with the Muslims’ political and cultural demands, and to justify this surrender by saying (and believing) that the Muslims have right on their side.

So let us understand what we are facing here. Islam is, as radio host Michael Graham has persuasively argued, a terrorist organization. But it is a terrorist organization not only because, as Graham put it, Muslims actively or passively support terror. Islam is a terrorist organization because terror is the ideological and pragmatic core of Islam’s message to the world: convert or die.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 28, 2005 08:40 AM | Send