Paul Eidelberg
and
Will Morrissey
What links Islam to Nazism is the
ethos of jihad. For both Islam and Nazism, war is not merely a
means to an end: mere conquest. War for both is a moral imperative:
for the Nazi, to purge the world of racial impurity, for the Muslim,
to purge the world of religious impurity.
Both have or require an enemy:
for the Muslim the “infidel”, for the Nazi the “Jew”, The genocide
perpetrated by Muslims against the Armenians preceded the genocide the
Nazis perpetrated against the Jews.
Although literary Islam and
Nazism have profound differences, these are of little significance to
the victims of these militant doctrines. The one reduces human beings
to dhimmis, the other to slaves.
Although Islam forbids
what may be termed “personal” suicide, it exalts suicide (i.e.,
martyrdom) in the context and ethos of holy war. That Arab parents can
exult in their children being sacrificed as human bombs is surely a
throwback to paganism. But this paganism indicates that the sanctity
of human life is not a normative Islamic doctrine. Indeed, on page
after page of the Qur`an¸ unbelievers are consigned to Hell – Islam’s
crematoria.
Some scholars contend that what
is here imputed to Islam should in truth be imputed to “Islamism”.
They allege that Islamism, as distinct from Islam, twists Qur`anic
teachings to un- Qur`anic uses. The candid scholar will admit,
however, that the Qur`an lends itself to such twists, and much more
clearly so when viewed from the Shari`ah, Islamic law.
The only way to eliminate what is
misleadingly called Islamism is to change the political regimes that
now rule the Islamic world. The existing Islamic regimes are highly
unlikely to change (except for the worse) by means of internal forces
– “inside-out”. Only a comprehensive geopolitical strategy will
transform these regimes, “outside-in”.
