Category: Islamism

Charles Krauthammer gives three reasons:

(1) The nature of the regime.

Did the Soviet Union in its 70 years ever deploy a suicide bomber? For Iran, as for other jihadists, suicide bombing is routine. Hence the trail of self-immolation, from the 1983 Marine barracks attack in Beirut to the Bulgaria bombing of July 2012.  Iran’s clerical regime rules in the name of a fundamentalist religion for whom the hereafter offers the ultimate rewards. For Soviet communists — thoroughly, militantly atheistic — such thinking was an opiate-laced fairy tale.

For all its global aspirations, the Soviet Union was intensely nationalist. The Islamic Republic sees itself as an instrument of its own brand of Shiite millenarianism — the messianic return of the “hidden Imam.”

It’s one thing to live in a state of mutual assured destruction with Stalin or Brezhnev, leaders of a philosophically materialist, historically grounded, deeply here-and-now regime. It’s quite another to be in a situation of mutual destruction with apocalyptic clerics who believe in the imminent advent of the Mahdi, the supremacy of the afterlife and holy war as the ultimate avenue to achieving it.

The classic formulation comes from Tehran’s fellow (and rival Sunni) jihadist al-Qaeda: “You love life and we love death.” Try deterring that.

(2) The nature of the grievance.

The Soviet quarrel with America was ideological. Iran’s quarrel with Israel is existential. The Soviets never proclaimed a desire to annihilate the American people. For Iran, the very existence of a Jewish state on Muslim land is a crime, an abomination, a cancer with which no negotiation, no coexistence, no accommodation is possible.

(3) The nature of the target.

America is a nation of 300 million; Israel, 8 million. America is a continental nation; Israel, a speck on the map, at one point eight miles wide. Israel is a “one-bomb country.” Its territory is so tiny, its population so concentrated that, as Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has famously said, “Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” A tiny nuclear arsenal would do the job.

In U.S.-Soviet deterrence, both sides knew that a nuclear war would destroy them mutually. The mullahs have thought the unthinkable to a different conclusion. They know about the Israeli arsenal. They also know, as Rafsanjani said, that in any exchange Israel would be destroyed instantly and forever, whereas the ummah — the Muslim world of 1.8 billion people whose redemption is the ultimate purpose of the Iranian revolution — would survive damaged but almost entirely intact.

This is one of the statues of Buddha that the Taliban dynamited in 2001:

Will the Pyramids of Egypt meet the same fate at the hands of similar miscreants?  See Victor Davis Hanson, Blowing Up History.

Of the world religions, "the religion of peace" is uniquely violent. 

Having said that, I must be an 'Islamophobe' right?

Wrong.  My fear of radical Islam is entirely rational.

A phobia is by definition an irrational fear.  Leftists introduced 'Islamophobia' as a semantic bludgeon to silence their opponents and prevent honest debate.  That is why it is utterly stupid for any conservative to use this word.  If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal!  Language matters.

By Diana West.  Excerpt, emphas is added:

Behold what is perhaps the most advanced state of dhimmitude. Here we see the dhimmi — Jan Kubis and the UN hierarchy — mimic perfectly the perpetual aggrievement of Islam. Islam's aggrievement becomes their own aggrievement, indeed, becomes even more important than any by now atavistic concept of Western justice and reason, as they draw power from the obviously more kinetic Islamic position. Because this whole affair is, and must be understood as, a barely concealed power play. It is a power play thinly disguised by the Islamic pose of victimhood. Such feigned victimhood becomes a trap for the " perpetrator" of the perceived aggrievement — in this case, the US military. Falling for the trap, as we in the West do time and time again, means accepting these intemperate, immoral and murderous manifestations of Islamic dementia in the same way that a "co-dependent" family member accepts and accommodates a mentally sick relative's manifestations of dementia in the home in order to create or preserve some measure of family peace or quiet; in order to stop the outburst, to tamp down the rage and violence, to make it all better — even if "better" is always just a lull before the next demented power play.

This is good news: "SAN'A, Yemen—Al Qaeda figure Anwar al-Awlaki, one of the most wanted terrorists on a U.S. target list, has been killed in Yemen, according to a statement issued by the country's defense ministry."

Excerpt:

Mr. Pipes thinks the main challenge for America today is militant Islam. "This is difficult to fight with because it is not a direct threat. A direct threat you can stand up to. It is also different because you are dealing with fanatics," he points out. 

"The communists were not fanatics. They were vicious people, but you could reason with them . . . and when the going got tough, they retreated." For instance, he says, "You had the Cuban missile crisis: Castro wanted the Russians to actually launch a nuclear attack on the United States, and he said 'OK, Cuba will be destroyed but socialism will triumph in the world.' And Khrushchev said no, nothing doing."

The communists "were never suicidal," either, Mr. Pipes adds, "and the ordinary Russians . . . they wanted to live. So this is a different danger. It's not as bad as the communist danger was because they don't [control] the arsenals of power, of military power. But they are fanatical, and they are irrational. We have to stand up to them and not be frightened of them. But we may be in for decades of the Muslim threat."

A Pakistani reader of this weblog, Awais Aftab, points us to his piece What is Liberal Islam?