August 7, 2012
By James Lewis
The newest revolutionary stance for the mentally infantile is radical Islam, which is being spread by the same tools of agitation and propaganda that launched Marxism a century ago.
During 70 years of Soviet genocide and tyranny, the KGB penetrated the West to an astonishing extent, helping to crank out generation after generation of mental androids, who all said the same thing, over and over again, feeling proud and heroic about themselves.
As a Harvard professor said recently, when he was in college, noisy Marxism was a cheap way to get a date. It still is.
In Intellectuals, historian Paul Johnson describes how most of the celebrated public figures of the last century were Soviet sympathizers. Moscow could do no wrong. That includes my old hero Jean-Paul Sartre, who championed every mass-murdering gangster regime in the Marxist world, from Stalin and Mao to Pol Pot and Ceaușescu the Romanian child-molester.
Jean Paul Sartre isn't my hero anymore.
A leftist website tells us that "[f]rom the late 1950s on, Sartre tried to marry his existentialist philosophy with ... Marxism. In ... 1960 ... Sartre declared that existentialism was a subordinate branch of Marxism."
That was around the time Nikita Khrushchev exposed Stalin's decades of massacres of the innocents -- but Professor Sartre didn't feel the need to change one little bit. Instead, he found new death idols to worship in Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. Sartre and all the other Euro-Marxo-philiacs knew exactly what they were doing. They knew about the massacres, and they were free to protest, but they chose to be criminally complicit.
If you wonder why Europe is still in a socialist mess today, look no farther than the Europeans' Marx-intoxicated educational system. The Soviet Union may have crumbled, but Euro-socialism has tried to take its place. Tony Blair (a socialist Labourite, after all) called it "Third Way Socialism." Today's European fiasco is not an accident.
After Greece and the others fall into bankruptcy next year, there will be a short interval of sanity, only to be followed by another big Euro imperialist fantasy. They've been doing it since Julius Caesar. They never stop, and today, they are already blaming America for fifty years of their own mass delusion.
At the start of the Marxist madness, in the 1930s, Malcolm Muggeridge saw the Ukrainian genocide up close, and he described its horrors to his socialist friends in England. Only to find out that they knew all about it already:
That's still true. There are no innocent Nazi professors on the campuses, and there are no innocent Marxist professors, either. If I had the money, I would send every single professor a copy of The Black Book of Communism, by a French team of Marxist historians, published by Harvard University Press. Come to think of it, some conservative outfit should do a mass mailing to all the Democrats and leftists in the country.
And all the college kids. Or maybe we should imitate the left and turn the Black Book into a Sunday cartoon series like "Doonesbury." You can't start too early.
Just thinking about it makes me shiver, because our crypto-fascist media pundits never change. They never 'fess up, simply ignoring one bloody massacre after another and shifting their utopian dreams to the future -- to some newer hope and change, as our current messiah told the world just four years ago. Nothing has changed.
Marxism is not a rational belief, but a virus that hides in the body politic for a decade or two, only to bust out again when a new generation of comes of age, without rabies shots.
Today's Marxist liberals still harbor a nasty case of anti-American rage for the failure of the Soviet Union twenty years ago. They hate capitalism for bringing more prosperity to more people on earth than anything they dreamed of in a century of terror. Soviet imperialism is always excused, and America is held to moral perfection.
Marxists are no different from Hitler's admirers in the 1930s, who also loved the Nazi state for its revolutionary commitment to wiping out the bastard peoples of the earth. Britain's King Edward VIII was one of them -- a secret that was buried after Winston Churchill exiled him to the Bahamas for holding secret surrender talks with Hitler. Fascist brutality has a magnetic attraction for such people. They are not innocent.
Which brings me to my Muslim agent of influence -- or at least a gent I met last year who looks, acts, and succeeds in that role to an amazing extent. But I can't prove it. Still, I wonder about Islamist influence-peddling, because Islamic fascists are not fools -- unlike our journalists and academics. They are as determined and ruthless as the Soviets ever were. Like Marxists, Islamists follow a creed of conquest. Only one generation after Mohammed, Muslims armies conquered half the known world. That was not an accident. It was a mix of absolutist ideology and a fanatical war doctrine, like Ahmadinejad reveals every day.
Are Muslim influence-peddlers active today?
They may not be wearing secret agent badges, but consider the facts.
1. A decade after 9/11/01, the murderous reality of Islamist terror is constantly denied by our media, academics, and politicians of the left. In sober reality, Islamists brutally abuse and commonly kill women, gays, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, African tribal peoples, and Marxist atheists. And each other, of course.
Denying that simple reality involves such breathtaking ignorance that it cannot be an accident.
Our militant feminists hate America's "patriarchy," but they never pipe up about the Taliban patriarchy of Afghanistan and the patriarchal genociders of the Sudan. Radical feminists like Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans even agitated to bring the Muslim Brothers to power in Egypt. That makes them either perverse or evil. Or both.
Here's another odd fact.
2. The heir apparent to the Saudi throne has been reliably identified as a financier of al-Qaeda before 9/11. And yet he is still rising to the top in Saudi Arabia, with the full knowledge of every intelligence agency in the world.
It's not as if AQ is out of business, either. They are surging back in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sinai Desert.
Obama's heroic assassination of bin Laden didn't kill their ideology. Money is somehow flowing to the AQs. After the media-faked "Arab Spring," they have spread more widely than ever before. Now al-Qaeda has its own glossy Life magazine-type terror-glorifier, like Soviet Life. The GWOT isn't over. Obama covers it up, kicking the can down the road. Let the next Republican deal with it. And get the blame, like George Bush got the blame for dealing with all the problems Bill Clinton kicked down the road.
And right in front of our noses, there is another interesting fact.
3. Since 9/11/01, a sophisticated campaign against the imaginary danger of "Islamophobia" was added to the sacred cows of the left, making it sinful to say a critical word about Muslim terrorists, just as it is verboten to say anything critical of Al Sharpton, Ellen Degeneres, or the messiah in the White House.
For the first time in a thousand years the West has blinded itself to the true nature of radical Islam. This is cultural suicide by political elites who pretend to be ignorant. But they know. They know.
Are there Muslim influence-peddlers?
Take a fourth fact.
4. A blatantly twisted pop history of "Islam -- The Religion of Nice" hit the best-seller list about a decade ago, authored by Karen Armstrong. The liberals I know fell for this scam with pathetic eagerness. Millions of them joined the lemming rush. That loving history of Islam was PR, just as Edgar Snow's PR plant about Mao Zedong as an "agrarian reformer" was long ago.
This is routine political propaganda from the left. It works, and it's incredibly cheap for the impact it has on the noodle-heads of the Republic. Pasta-brain propaganda pays for itself, and today, tens of millions of spaghetti-heads still believe it.
How about number 5?
5. Israel has been viciously lied about and scapegoated by the Euro-American left for decades now, ever since Saudi oil money began to flow during the Carter years. During the Bush years, Jacques Chirac was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as being on the billion-dollar take from Saddam Hussein, and that's only the tiny tip of Euro-socialist corruption. America seems to be falling to the same disease. Oil equals money equals corruption in one-party regimes, like the European Union.
The European Union has no popular legitimacy; it suffers from what it coyly calls a "democracy deficit," meaning that the real power-class isn't elected, while the elected class doesn't have any power. It's a Potemkin Village, a Hollywood front. Which is why the southern half of the continent is now going bankrupt: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and pretty soon, France and Ireland. One-party government infallibly leads to a spoils system, just as the rule of "affirmative action" has created a spoils system in the United States. The big-city Democrat machines have been running one-party crony regimes forever, and with Obama they've gone national.
I've wondered about all that.
Then last year I met my Muslim influence-peddler.
Imagine a fun, charming, Westernized Muslim with no visible means of support, but with friends in wealthy and influential places. He looks and acts like the pied piper from the Brothers Grimm fairy stories. Just havin' fun. He doesn't peddle Islam, but he will talk about it if you ask him.
Exactly what Muslim Mystery Man does in real life is a mystery. He might be gay or heterosexual -- who knows? -- but I did read about a Muslim imam the other day proclaiming a public fatwa, blessing gay sex if it is done for the sake of jihad. My pied piper could be anything or everything. Jihad can use mass suicide attacks like 9/11/01, but agitation, propaganda, bribery, and gay sex all have a role to play. Islam is an ideology of conquest, and like Soviet imperialism, the end justifies the means.
My Muslim pied piper lives in a university town where useful idiots abound. He mostly goes around the world with a big smile, making friends. His wealthy contacts seem to show that money is talking somewhere.
But he just smiles.
I got to talking with the gent last year, and the conversation drifted to his Muslim background, which, needless to say, is completely pacifist, though he belongs to one of the more radical sects. But all that is past. Today he is a modern Muslim and feels comfortable associating with infi...with non-Muslims all over. My acquaintance goes around spreading the word, as George Bush used to say, that "Islam means peace." (It doesn't. Islam means "surrender." There is a major difference.)
The Western media and colleges are packed with his kind, because every good liberal has to prove he is not Islamophobic. Say, a thousand Muslim pied pipers spread around strategic places in the West: the media, the universities, the web, the big corporations. The phony "Arab Spring" was started by one Walid Ghoneim, a Google VP for Marketing for North Africa (which includes Egypt), as described by the New York Times. Mr. Ghoneim tweeted and Facebooked the Tahrir Square demonstrations from a loft in Manhattan, apparently with the generous permission of his bosses at Google, the New York Times, and inevitably, the CIA and the Obama administration. Because stirring revolution in other countries is against federal law. The Obamination was looking the other way while that "Spring" was a-stirring. By now, maybe 50,000 Arabs have killed each other in the "Spring," from Tunisia to Yemen. In Syria the civil war is still raging.
All because of one little guy in a Manhattan loft, using Twitter and Google. And a whole PR machine hidden behind the scenes, including (maybe) David Axelrod.
The giveaway with my Muslim pied piper was the total absence of jihad in his talk about Islam. Jihad is one of the five chief obligations for believing Muslims. Even the obligation of charity, which sounds fine and liberal, includes a tax for jihad. Jihad is not a little thing that can be swept under the rug.
But Islamists keep trying to sweep jihad under that Persian rug. With political liars (like Obama), you can learn everything by listening for what they don't say.
I wasn't impolite enough to ask my acquaintance whether he had heard the 164 "War Verses" in the Koran.
He was born and raised in a radical Muslim sect, after all. He knows, he knows.
But for the rest of us, it's good to know these little gems:
By James Lewis
The newest revolutionary stance for the mentally infantile is radical Islam, which is being spread by the same tools of agitation and propaganda that launched Marxism a century ago.
During 70 years of Soviet genocide and tyranny, the KGB penetrated the West to an astonishing extent, helping to crank out generation after generation of mental androids, who all said the same thing, over and over again, feeling proud and heroic about themselves.
As a Harvard professor said recently, when he was in college, noisy Marxism was a cheap way to get a date. It still is.
In Intellectuals, historian Paul Johnson describes how most of the celebrated public figures of the last century were Soviet sympathizers. Moscow could do no wrong. That includes my old hero Jean-Paul Sartre, who championed every mass-murdering gangster regime in the Marxist world, from Stalin and Mao to Pol Pot and Ceaușescu the Romanian child-molester.
Jean Paul Sartre isn't my hero anymore.
A leftist website tells us that "[f]rom the late 1950s on, Sartre tried to marry his existentialist philosophy with ... Marxism. In ... 1960 ... Sartre declared that existentialism was a subordinate branch of Marxism."
That was around the time Nikita Khrushchev exposed Stalin's decades of massacres of the innocents -- but Professor Sartre didn't feel the need to change one little bit. Instead, he found new death idols to worship in Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. Sartre and all the other Euro-Marxo-philiacs knew exactly what they were doing. They knew about the massacres, and they were free to protest, but they chose to be criminally complicit.
If you wonder why Europe is still in a socialist mess today, look no farther than the Europeans' Marx-intoxicated educational system. The Soviet Union may have crumbled, but Euro-socialism has tried to take its place. Tony Blair (a socialist Labourite, after all) called it "Third Way Socialism." Today's European fiasco is not an accident.
After Greece and the others fall into bankruptcy next year, there will be a short interval of sanity, only to be followed by another big Euro imperialist fantasy. They've been doing it since Julius Caesar. They never stop, and today, they are already blaming America for fifty years of their own mass delusion.
At the start of the Marxist madness, in the 1930s, Malcolm Muggeridge saw the Ukrainian genocide up close, and he described its horrors to his socialist friends in England. Only to find out that they knew all about it already:
My wife's aunt was Beatrice Webb (co-founder of the British Labour Party). And so one saw close at hand the degree to which they all knew about the (Soviet) regime ... but they liked it. I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person ... saying to me, 'Yes, it's true, people disappear in Russia.'
She said it with ... great satisfaction[.]Scratch a Marxist, and you find a bloody-minded professor.
That's still true. There are no innocent Nazi professors on the campuses, and there are no innocent Marxist professors, either. If I had the money, I would send every single professor a copy of The Black Book of Communism, by a French team of Marxist historians, published by Harvard University Press. Come to think of it, some conservative outfit should do a mass mailing to all the Democrats and leftists in the country.
And all the college kids. Or maybe we should imitate the left and turn the Black Book into a Sunday cartoon series like "Doonesbury." You can't start too early.
Just thinking about it makes me shiver, because our crypto-fascist media pundits never change. They never 'fess up, simply ignoring one bloody massacre after another and shifting their utopian dreams to the future -- to some newer hope and change, as our current messiah told the world just four years ago. Nothing has changed.
Marxism is not a rational belief, but a virus that hides in the body politic for a decade or two, only to bust out again when a new generation of comes of age, without rabies shots.
Today's Marxist liberals still harbor a nasty case of anti-American rage for the failure of the Soviet Union twenty years ago. They hate capitalism for bringing more prosperity to more people on earth than anything they dreamed of in a century of terror. Soviet imperialism is always excused, and America is held to moral perfection.
Marxists are no different from Hitler's admirers in the 1930s, who also loved the Nazi state for its revolutionary commitment to wiping out the bastard peoples of the earth. Britain's King Edward VIII was one of them -- a secret that was buried after Winston Churchill exiled him to the Bahamas for holding secret surrender talks with Hitler. Fascist brutality has a magnetic attraction for such people. They are not innocent.
Which brings me to my Muslim agent of influence -- or at least a gent I met last year who looks, acts, and succeeds in that role to an amazing extent. But I can't prove it. Still, I wonder about Islamist influence-peddling, because Islamic fascists are not fools -- unlike our journalists and academics. They are as determined and ruthless as the Soviets ever were. Like Marxists, Islamists follow a creed of conquest. Only one generation after Mohammed, Muslims armies conquered half the known world. That was not an accident. It was a mix of absolutist ideology and a fanatical war doctrine, like Ahmadinejad reveals every day.
Are Muslim influence-peddlers active today?
They may not be wearing secret agent badges, but consider the facts.
1. A decade after 9/11/01, the murderous reality of Islamist terror is constantly denied by our media, academics, and politicians of the left. In sober reality, Islamists brutally abuse and commonly kill women, gays, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, African tribal peoples, and Marxist atheists. And each other, of course.
Denying that simple reality involves such breathtaking ignorance that it cannot be an accident.
Our militant feminists hate America's "patriarchy," but they never pipe up about the Taliban patriarchy of Afghanistan and the patriarchal genociders of the Sudan. Radical feminists like Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans even agitated to bring the Muslim Brothers to power in Egypt. That makes them either perverse or evil. Or both.
Here's another odd fact.
2. The heir apparent to the Saudi throne has been reliably identified as a financier of al-Qaeda before 9/11. And yet he is still rising to the top in Saudi Arabia, with the full knowledge of every intelligence agency in the world.
It's not as if AQ is out of business, either. They are surging back in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sinai Desert.
Obama's heroic assassination of bin Laden didn't kill their ideology. Money is somehow flowing to the AQs. After the media-faked "Arab Spring," they have spread more widely than ever before. Now al-Qaeda has its own glossy Life magazine-type terror-glorifier, like Soviet Life. The GWOT isn't over. Obama covers it up, kicking the can down the road. Let the next Republican deal with it. And get the blame, like George Bush got the blame for dealing with all the problems Bill Clinton kicked down the road.
And right in front of our noses, there is another interesting fact.
3. Since 9/11/01, a sophisticated campaign against the imaginary danger of "Islamophobia" was added to the sacred cows of the left, making it sinful to say a critical word about Muslim terrorists, just as it is verboten to say anything critical of Al Sharpton, Ellen Degeneres, or the messiah in the White House.
For the first time in a thousand years the West has blinded itself to the true nature of radical Islam. This is cultural suicide by political elites who pretend to be ignorant. But they know. They know.
Are there Muslim influence-peddlers?
Take a fourth fact.
4. A blatantly twisted pop history of "Islam -- The Religion of Nice" hit the best-seller list about a decade ago, authored by Karen Armstrong. The liberals I know fell for this scam with pathetic eagerness. Millions of them joined the lemming rush. That loving history of Islam was PR, just as Edgar Snow's PR plant about Mao Zedong as an "agrarian reformer" was long ago.
This is routine political propaganda from the left. It works, and it's incredibly cheap for the impact it has on the noodle-heads of the Republic. Pasta-brain propaganda pays for itself, and today, tens of millions of spaghetti-heads still believe it.
How about number 5?
5. Israel has been viciously lied about and scapegoated by the Euro-American left for decades now, ever since Saudi oil money began to flow during the Carter years. During the Bush years, Jacques Chirac was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as being on the billion-dollar take from Saddam Hussein, and that's only the tiny tip of Euro-socialist corruption. America seems to be falling to the same disease. Oil equals money equals corruption in one-party regimes, like the European Union.
The European Union has no popular legitimacy; it suffers from what it coyly calls a "democracy deficit," meaning that the real power-class isn't elected, while the elected class doesn't have any power. It's a Potemkin Village, a Hollywood front. Which is why the southern half of the continent is now going bankrupt: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and pretty soon, France and Ireland. One-party government infallibly leads to a spoils system, just as the rule of "affirmative action" has created a spoils system in the United States. The big-city Democrat machines have been running one-party crony regimes forever, and with Obama they've gone national.
I've wondered about all that.
Then last year I met my Muslim influence-peddler.
Imagine a fun, charming, Westernized Muslim with no visible means of support, but with friends in wealthy and influential places. He looks and acts like the pied piper from the Brothers Grimm fairy stories. Just havin' fun. He doesn't peddle Islam, but he will talk about it if you ask him.
Exactly what Muslim Mystery Man does in real life is a mystery. He might be gay or heterosexual -- who knows? -- but I did read about a Muslim imam the other day proclaiming a public fatwa, blessing gay sex if it is done for the sake of jihad. My pied piper could be anything or everything. Jihad can use mass suicide attacks like 9/11/01, but agitation, propaganda, bribery, and gay sex all have a role to play. Islam is an ideology of conquest, and like Soviet imperialism, the end justifies the means.
My Muslim pied piper lives in a university town where useful idiots abound. He mostly goes around the world with a big smile, making friends. His wealthy contacts seem to show that money is talking somewhere.
But he just smiles.
I got to talking with the gent last year, and the conversation drifted to his Muslim background, which, needless to say, is completely pacifist, though he belongs to one of the more radical sects. But all that is past. Today he is a modern Muslim and feels comfortable associating with infi...with non-Muslims all over. My acquaintance goes around spreading the word, as George Bush used to say, that "Islam means peace." (It doesn't. Islam means "surrender." There is a major difference.)
The Western media and colleges are packed with his kind, because every good liberal has to prove he is not Islamophobic. Say, a thousand Muslim pied pipers spread around strategic places in the West: the media, the universities, the web, the big corporations. The phony "Arab Spring" was started by one Walid Ghoneim, a Google VP for Marketing for North Africa (which includes Egypt), as described by the New York Times. Mr. Ghoneim tweeted and Facebooked the Tahrir Square demonstrations from a loft in Manhattan, apparently with the generous permission of his bosses at Google, the New York Times, and inevitably, the CIA and the Obama administration. Because stirring revolution in other countries is against federal law. The Obamination was looking the other way while that "Spring" was a-stirring. By now, maybe 50,000 Arabs have killed each other in the "Spring," from Tunisia to Yemen. In Syria the civil war is still raging.
All because of one little guy in a Manhattan loft, using Twitter and Google. And a whole PR machine hidden behind the scenes, including (maybe) David Axelrod.
The giveaway with my Muslim pied piper was the total absence of jihad in his talk about Islam. Jihad is one of the five chief obligations for believing Muslims. Even the obligation of charity, which sounds fine and liberal, includes a tax for jihad. Jihad is not a little thing that can be swept under the rug.
But Islamists keep trying to sweep jihad under that Persian rug. With political liars (like Obama), you can learn everything by listening for what they don't say.
I wasn't impolite enough to ask my acquaintance whether he had heard the 164 "War Verses" in the Koran.
He was born and raised in a radical Muslim sect, after all. He knows, he knows.
But for the rest of us, it's good to know these little gems:
[2.190] ...fight in the way of Allah with those who fight with you...[2.191] And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers.
[4.74] Therefore let those fight in the way of Allah, who sell this world's life for the hereafter; and whoever fights in the way of Allah, then be he slain or be he victorious, We shall grant him a mighty reward. [4.75] ...fight in the way ofAllah... [4.76] Those who believe fight in the way of Allah, and those who disbelieve fight in the way of the Satan. Fight therefore against the friends of the Satan... [4.77] ...when fighting is prescribed for them...Our Lord! why hast Thou ordained fighting for us?...
[8.01] ...the spoils of war...The spoils of war belong to Allah and the messenger
...make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.K 47:035
[Set 71, Count 138] Be not fainthearted then; and invite not the infidels to peace when ye have the upper hand: for God is with you, and will not defraud you of the recompense of your works...Religion of peace?
American Thinker
