Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 12

"a boot stamping on a human face, forever." — George Orwell.

Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 12
Photo by Diego Lozano / Unsplash

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11

This is the final part in the series.

Muslims worry about a tsunami of apostasy coming their way. The free world has a far more serious tsunami to worry about. We are proud of our scientific, technological, social and cultural accomplishments, but in less than a generation from now, all positions of power and influence in our society will be filled by people who think the absence of “safe spaces” in a university a grave injustice, who want the James Webb Space Telescope renamed after someone who had nothing whatsoever to do with science, but is eminently qualified for the honour because she was black, a slave and a woman, who think speech can be violence, who torch cities because only black lives matter, who regard disagreement with them as heresy, who are perplexed by anyone defending the right to free speech of someone they disagree with, who think nothing at all of advocating for such a heretic to be killed, who judge something a crime or not a crime depending on the “community” of the accused, who believe that history must be corrected or erased, and that humour is a serious matter. A tsunami of indoctrinated, socially-stunted and culturally-annulled generations is heading our way. These people will make decisions about war and peace, about what is to come, and about what has gone before. It could well be that thirty years from now, these words were never written, and this writer never existed.

To get a flavour of things to come, an at least partial analogy might be the products of China’s One-Child Policy coming of age at time of writing. Single children are now two-generations deep: single children of single children. They have no siblings, no cousins, and no uncles or aunts. The likelihood is that they will have been brought up by their grandparents, as their parents will have been working away and seen them only at New Year and during Golden Week — large swathes of two generations of Chinese citizens whose closest companion is a smartphone. This is not glib talk. I have seen the anguish when students have to part with their phones during examinations.

Add to this that state policy regiments every schoolchild’s day from the moment they wake up (all at the same time) to the moment they go to bed (all at the same time). What they will do from one hour to the next, every single day, has been decided for them. Things are so arranged as to ensure that every student emerges from this education system responding exactly the same as every other student, knowing exactly the same things as every other student, and preoccupied with exactly the same concerns as every other student. The young adults who emerge from this system appear well-adjusted on the face of it. But wait until China wants to seize a Japanese island, or turn on a religious or ethnic minority, or close down foreign businesses…

One day everyone keeps their heads down and gets on with their lives, the next day a hatred of Japan and all things Japanese sweeps the cities, with shop windows smashed and cars attacked. The meekest, mildest students erupt, “They want to steal our island!” Young people film themselves trashing Japanese products in stores and put the videos online. It is as if a switch had been flicked and a single instruction activated.

These events have a chilling familiarity to them. Black-and-white films remind us of Il Duce and Der Führer turning entire populations on and off. We can read how Gensui Prince Yamagata Aritomo militarised Japan by reducing the entire nation to mindless automatons who would rather die than have dishonour brought upon their emperor. I’ve seen the same thing when Ayatollah Khomeini put a fatwa on Salman Rushdie. To not display fanatical readiness to kill the author was to dishonour Muslims. Madrassa teaching ensures that murder sprees can burst forth from any mosque on any Friday afternoon. China has just "improved" its education system to madrassa standard. And closer to home, who doesn't know that it takes just one accusation on social media and a crazed mob descends to disrupt, harass and intimidate, not stopping until their target’s life is destroyed.

Totalitarian systems are specially designed to find the inhuman in us.. They nourish and protect the inhumanity they find or create, nurture and guide it to maturity, and then, when the time comes, set it loose. When the call comes, there will always be Chinese ready to attack foreigners and Muslims ready to attack the kufaar, making those who do not respond to the call completely irrelevant. They are all raised by methods that control them, make them all the same, and ready to obey as one. This is why those in the West who pin their hopes on "peaceful Muslims" and want to protect them are deluded. Reality does not submit to sentimentality.

The mindless collective comprising so-called social justice warriors, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, etc., raised on multiculturalism, are similarly ready for when the call comes, they are all instantly weaponised, as we have already seen with cancel culture, the jihad invasions of Europe and North America under the guise of a “refugee crisis,” and with the usurping of the November 2020 US Presidential elections.

All these cases lack any ethical frame of reference, and the distinction between good and evil becomes meaningless because we, by definition, are good, and they, by definition, are bad. All that is needed to be good, is to be a member of the right group, and all that is needed to be evil, is to be a member of the wrong group, or sound like the wrong group. Ethics is abolished. Goodness is demonstrated by being inherently aggressive towards the “evil” group. In such an environment, reason itself is rejected as an instrument of evil, since reason interferes with the truth of revelation. One of the better Muslim articulators of the relationship between Islamic revelation and the intellect is "revert" Saajid Lipham:

Number one: Islam is about following revelation. Islam is about submitting to Allah. Allah knows everything. He sent the prophet with guidance, so we submit to that. We follow that. If our intellect, our conjecture, our perspective, conflicts with that, we know the deficiency is with our own perspective, our own conjecture. So, that's a very simple but foundational concept of what Islam actually is. …Then number two: the importance of following the understanding of the companions of the prophet. This was the best generation. They were taught by the prophet himself, and we need to understand the religion according to how they understood it. …I don’t care what anyone thinks. I just care what the divine revelation teaches.[1]

In other words, total submission to the authority of Allah. This is the other side of the fascist coin: the inner compulsion to submit. It is a character flaw of fascists of all stripes, and goes hand in hand with the self-appointed duty of imposing such submission on everyone, and it is imposition without restraint, the natural turf of the sadist, the brute and the psychopath. Jihad Watch writer Hugh Fitzgerald captures this point well:

Islam, like the beliefs of the far-right, offers an immediate brotherhood of fellow believers, and little need to think for oneself, but only to “submit” to authority.

Some may remember the case of Devon Arthurs, a former neo-Nazi who killed his friends for “disrespecting Islam.” The German politician Arthur Wagner was a leading member of the “right-wing” and “anti-immigrant” Alternativ[e fūr] Deutschland Party until he converted to Islam. Arnoud van Doorn, a member of Geert Wilders’s Dutch Freedom Party — which because it is anti-Islam is always described as a “far-right” party — left it in 2011, converted to Islam in 2012, and soon after made hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 2014, Maxence Buttey, a local councillor for the National Front (FN), France’s analogous far-right party, converted to Islam. Far-right prisoners are more likely to become Muslims than are common, criminals.[2]

When Saajid Lipham says, "I don’t care what anyone thinks. I just care what the divine revelation teaches," that "anyone" includes himself. He has submitted totally, foreclosing his own thoughts, just as Islam had foreclosed all possibility of ever saving itself from itself. Lipham has locked himself into a prison on the edge of a cliff and flung the key out over the edge. He will never know that the cliff is eroding, and when it crumbles, he will feel vindicated in at least going down with it.

Without Islam, Saajid Lipham is, for all intents and purposes, nothing: like those who had spent their entire lives under Stalin left bereft of meaning upon the dictator's death; like lifelong slaves manumitted in Mauritania only to return to their former masters, unable to otherwise conceive of themselves; like widows who hurl themselves onto their dead husbands' funeral pyres to end the lives they never had. Such people encapsulate in purest form the self-negation that is religion, what Karl Marx describes as, "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions."[3]

It might surprise the reader to learn that the same phenomenon, not quite as extreme as with believers, obtains amongst Western ex-Muslims. Instead of leaving Islam and embracing their new freedom, they immediately submit to Left-wing ideological orthodoxy. The only problem for them is that apostasy from Islam implies criticism of Muslims, the Left's darling "oppressed group". To the Left, apostasy from Islam is the ex-Muslim's original sin. Pathos runs deep in the ex-Muslim lament at the Left shunning them. Yet, like Saajid Lipham who cannot but submit to Islam, many Western ex-Muslims cannot but submit to the Left. They crave the blessing of the Left that never comes. But they have nothing else, because like Lipham, they shun their own autonomy.

Revelation is good for believers, since it circumscribes, and often precludes, reason. Reason not only interferes with the certainty of revelation, it also interferes with its preeminence downstream, such as the exercise of aggression and violence. Extreme violence protects revelation from ethics. On North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Christopher Hitchens observes:

If you’re confronted with something as pathologically evil as that, what is your wish? What should be your view? Is it possible to coexist with this kind of thing? I would say not, because it's inherently aggressive. One thing we know about fascism is it is organised for war. It is not the case that it just wants to have a private population of its own to keep in a torture chamber and toy with as it likes. It will always be found to build an army about twice the size of its economy to menace the neighbours, indeed to do what the East Asia, Oceania, Eurasia analogy [in Nineteen Eighty-Four] suggests: to keep people in the state of permanent threat of war and to make it real, to make good on it. Fascism means war. What that meant is it intends it. It also implies it. It necessitates it. It's true.

"Warfare is ordained for you," Qur'an 2:216. "Lo! Allah hath bought from the believers [Muslims] their lives and their wealth because the Garden will be theirs: they shall fight in the way of Allah [jihad] and shall slay and be slain," Qur'an 9:111. "Jihad means to war against non-Muslims," Reliance of the Traveller, Book O9:0. "And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah," Qur'an 8:39. In short, Islam means war, permanent war. It intends it. It implies it. It necessitates it. It wages it. And it cannot do any of these things without Muslims. That is the truth.

"Only totalitarian states need upload filters." Crediit: Markus Spiske, Pexels

There is nothing “hypothetical” about George Orwell’s warnings, as half-baked intellectuals like Max Fawcett, Adam Gopnik and Will Self would have it;[4] his warnings are not conjecture. They are not guesswork. Yet very few grasp the gravity of these matters, thinking of his novels as they would of any fiction, the stuff of cosy bookclubs and comfy wing chairs. For the rest, to use Yuri Bezmenov’s colourful language, “until he receives a kick in his fat bottom, when a military boot crushes his balls, then he will understand, but not before that.” This was George Orwell’s dying message:

In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. The sex instinct will be eradicated. We shall abolish the orgasm. There will be no loyalty except loyalty to the party, but always, there will be the intoxication of power. Always at every moment there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don't let it happen. It depends on you …”[5]

"a boot stamping on a human face, forever."

Remember the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas to triumphant cries of “Allahu Akbar!” and ISIS doing the same to ancient temples in Syria? Remember Muslims in France — not the "extremists," but the rest of "the Muslim community" whom we must all take such great care to protect — rejoicing when the Notre Dame roof went up in flames, smiling and sharing sweats when a Palestinian terrorist  blew up a restaurant full of Jews? Is it even possible to recall all the cultures that Islam has obliterated in its imperialist ravaging of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and along with it their names, cuisines, books, social organisations, town layouts, architecture, monuments, sculptures and distinctive dress, reducing all women to formless sacks and all men to severe bearded freaks with chopped-off trousers?[6] The Stalinist and Maoist "national liberation movements" did the same, once they took power and ushered in post-colonial decline. Then along came Black Lives Matter and set off its own great history obliteration spree.

Adolf Hitler envied Muslims their fascism and resented having inherited only soppy Christians to forge into a Third Reich. He was quite explicit in that he would rather have had Islam than Nazism. What does anyone imagine ISIS would have accomplished, or jihad historically, for that matter, had Muslims been equipped with Nazi industrial capabilities and organisational acumen? There would already be no non-Muslims in the world, everyone else either killed or converted, as the Qur’an commands.

Recall ISIS in power — you know, the severed head footballs, the severed heads on railings, the severed heads in rubbish bins, the videos on how to sever heads, etc; remember the crucifixions and the slave markets? Remember those? It is all directly from the Qur'an, the very Qur'an the all Muslims revere, including the "peaceful" ones that so many in the West are so anxious to protect. Now multiply ISIS across the globe. Welcome to "all religion is for Allah." These are the monsters whom so many in the West insist on taking back, "because they are citizens." They cannot enforce any laws against Muslims, but those laws that benefit Muslims they insist on scrupulously observing, even if doing so is quite obviously suicidal.

Nazism is Islam lite, and the European Union, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Canada, New Zealand and now even the United States, bend over backwards to clear a path for Muslims to impose the real thing on the West, whose people, secure in their self-righteous ignorance, insist on keeping “the religion of peace” firmly between their blinkers and the real thing out of view. Western ex-Muslims, whom one would have hoped would demonstrate some rigour in their dealings with the threat of jihad, would rather pontificate on how one is to behave towards the people who revere the very book that gives the world ISIS, Al-Qaida, Ansar Dine, the Taliban... and every Muslim who dreams of Shari'a, beats their wives, murders their daughters, sends their children to madrassa, etc., you know, the peaceful ones. YouTube personality, "friendly ex-neighbourhood ex-Muslim" Abdullah Sameer, presumes to lecture the world as follows:

People can and should criticise Islam whenever such criticism is warranted because Islam is a religion. It is nothing but a set of ideas, which, if true, should be able to withstand scrutiny. However people should treat Muslims, the people who follow Islam, with the dignity, just like they would treat people from any other religion. So I will reiterate again: there is a difference between legitimate criticism of Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry.[7]

This nonsense is several layers deep. "[Islam] is nothing but a set of ideas." Really? Tell that to the heads getting kicked around in the dust, or assailed by flies on railings, or piled up in rubbish bins. Tell the women in the slave markets that Islam is nothing but a set of ideas. Tell the tens of thousands of gang-rape victims that Islam is just a set of ideas. Tell the young women murdered by their fathers and brothers that Islam is just a set of ideas. Maybe divorced women would feel better about being pimped out before they can reconcile, if they knew that Islam is nothing but a set of ideas. Describing Islam as "nothing but a set of ideas" is unpardonable. On that score, Nazism, too, is nothing but a set of ideas, as is Stalinism, as is Maoism. Give me a break!

"...which, if true, should be able to withstand scrutiny." Leaving aside the nonsense of whether or not Islam is "true," at least Saajid Lipham understands that the "truth" of religion is not a matter of scrutiny. To the Muslim, Islam is true because it is taken as revelation. Revelation is truth before which scrutiny must submit. "...people should treat Muslims, the people who follow Islam, with ...dignity." The people who follow Islam, i.e., the people who gave the world over 1400 years of grotesque cruelty and bloodletting all the way to ISIS, Al-Qaida, Ansar Dine, the Taliban, and countless other mass murder outfits that plague or world today... deceived non-Muslims, extorted from non-Muslims, waged aggressive warfare against non-Muslims... and extolled the virtues of and imposed Shari'a, wive-beating, paedophilia, infanticide, madrassa indoctrination... and continue to do so; these people should be treated with dignity. Jordanian writer, social critic and former Muslim, Rami Dabbas, talks of a:

....deadly disease and threat to mankind that over the past 1,420 years has killed no fewer than 270 million people, and continues to take lives today. That threat is Islamic jihad, and it targets both Muslims and non-Muslims alike. ...There are close to one-and-a-half billion Muslims in the world today, and most of them to one degree or another believe in Sharia Law and the precept of jihad.[8]

Estimates vary widely with varying degrees of credibility, but generally, Hitler comes out as having killed roughly 13 million, Stalin 20 million, and Mao 45 million[9] and Muslims 270 million. Abdullah Sameer would have us believe that neither a set of ideas, nor a people deserving of dignity accomplished such a stunning historic record. Therefore, it never happened. Where have we seen the past erased before? It takes a particular kind of narcissistic self-righteousness to associate the Muslims' current behaviour and horrific track record with "dignity," rather than with their adherence to Islam. We are told that people must treat Muslims, "...just like they would treat people from any other religion." Whichever way one might think Muslims deserve to be treated, no people from other religions deserve to be treated in the same way. To suggest any such parity is a gross slander of other religions. Just because I am an atheist does not mean that I should be blind to this distinction.

When Sameer does make a distinction, it is a false one: "there is a difference between legitimate criticism of Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry." Of course there is a difference between apples and oranges. A useful distinction would have been between criticism of Islam and criticism of Muslims, or between a priori rejection of Islam and anti-Muslim bigotry. What Sameer does is to protect Muslims from criticism by slandering as bigots those who would dare to find fault with Muslims. Making this point is neither a criticism of Muslims, nor an endorsement of bigots. That much, at least, must be clear. In Sameer's world, there is both warranted and unwarranted criticism of Islam. Yet no criticism of Muslims is warranted. All criticism of Muslims is, by definition, bigotry.

To hold that Islam is nothing but a set of ideas, and Muslims are the same as people from any other religion, i.e., they are distinct from the set of ideas that is Islam, is to say that had there been no Muslims in the world, 9/11 would still have taken place and the 41,000 religiously-motivated murders Muslims perpetrated since then would still have occurred. Who gives effect to the set of ideas that is Islam, if not Muslims, and only Muslims. It is nonsensical to criticise Nazism but insist on never criticising Nazis. Who took Nazism out of Mein Kampf and into Auschwitz? Who took jihad out of the Qur'an and into the Twin Towers? The lame "not all Muslims" objection can easily be set against a "not all Nazis" objection. The point is not "not all Muslims" or "not all Nazis." The point is that only Muslims give effect to Islam; only Nazis give effect to Nazism. Criticism of Islam is inseparable from criticism of "the people who follow Islam." It would be charitable to describe this friendly ex-Muslim as naïve, for whether he likes it or not, he is effectively an apologist for Islam.

But there is worse. The totalitarian propensities of Islam do not automatically dissolve upon apostasy. Having escaped Islam, there are those former Muslims who feel it their appointed duty to herd all former Muslims into a tribe and lay down what an ex-Muslim may say and not say, whom an ex-Muslim may support and not support, generally ordain what is fitting behaviour for an ex-Muslim, and are more than ready to enforce compliance. 'Ex-Muslim,' rather than describing a former condition, is appropriated and framed into a "community" (in the perverted identity politics sense). There is the conceit that leaving Islam equates to joining us, and the focus very quickly shifts from destroying Islam to "expanding the community." In Western ex-Muslim circles, with a small number of notable exceptions, the autonomous individual is nowhere in sight. Witness, for example an up-and-coming young tyrant, Armin Navabi, enforcing compliance:

...and the transgressing ex-Muslims swiftly falling into line:

Instead of defending their right to dissent, and calling out Armin Navabi for his oppressive behaviour, both Harris Sultan and Nuriyah Khan instantly capitulated. Ex-Muslims they may be, but dissidents they are not. They both accepted that certain views are halal for ex-Muslims to hold, while other views are haram. I set up this website specifically to raise the awareness in ex-Muslims that leaving Islam does not, in and of itself, make you free, if all you're doing is substituting one submission for another, like slaves who run to better masters. If you cannot see that Armin Navabi and Mohamed Hijab are the same kind of person, then all your work in freeing yourself is still ahead of you.

Western policies towards Muslims are often described as mistakes, ignorant or naïve. I do not for one moment imagine that Western leaders are naïve and do not know what they do. Their policies are not "mistakes." They are cynical manipulators of their own people, whom they are handing to "the best of people" on a platter to do with as they will, starting with their nations’ females. Americans seem blissfully unaware that their rape epidemic is just about to kick off, and since the rapists will be Muslims, that will be the end of any feminist interest in rape. Let's see what happens to #MeToo when the Afghans get going.

It remains only to be seen what euphemism the Left and their ex-Muslim acolytes will come up with to trivialise the mass sexual assaults. The go-to British term is "grooming," a term that even British ex-Muslims use when they are forced to talk about the Muslim rape gangs plaguing that country. The Western leaders who are enabling this descent into madness very much deserve what’s coming to them. Like the sons of Kaiser Wilhelm II who joined the Nazi Party in hope of securing the monarchy in exchange for their lending their support, these leaders hope that Islam will look favourably upon them for their pre-emptive capitulation. They will be the first to be beheaded.

Barack Obama bowing to the Saudi king. Joe Biden kneeling before the Qatari emir. Jucinda Adern donning a hijab in Parliament. A British politician in pursuit of "the Muslim vote" making a complete dog's breakfast of "As-salamu-alaikum," while another, after those same votes, posting pictures to all the world of his bacon and eggs meal before his solidarity Ramadan fast. But the 44th President of the United States takes the cake. He vowed that, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Given that anything other than Islam is slander of the prophet of Islam, Obama was promising nothing less than, "all religion must be for Allah," the ultimate aim of jihad. Even the German Royal Family sidling up to the Nazis did not go that far.

It seems extremely likely that we are witnessing a global totalitarian realignment against freedom and democracy in general and against the United States and Israel in particular. Engaged in this frantic snapping, snarling and circling, not yet an actual world war, are the Chinese regime, the Democratic Party in the US, global capital, Islam, the European Union, the Left, and, anxious to return to the big time, Russia. As before the First World War, alliances will shift and change in response to contingent pressures, for they are all both friends and enemies of one another, but the enemy of them all is the autonomous individual, the product of the Enlightenment. Even as the fascist ententes flex, shift and strain for the best position from which to launch their bids for world domination, in the Muslim heartlands the autonomous individual recognises himself, and the totalitarianism that is Islam is no longer quite so total. It seems it is those who defy and escape Islam in its heartlands who will next bear the mantle of freedom for us all. The prescience of George Orwell in this regards is uncanny:

Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships—an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.[10]

Islam calls for the death of those who apostatise, a profoundly individual act. Whether such apostates then slip quietly into the night, or turn around to take on the monster, makes no difference; Islam marks them all for death. The autonomous individual’s response to such absolutism is often: I must do as much damage to Islam as I can before its knife finds my neck. The autonomous individual is what it’s all about, the central character in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He or she is the embodiment of freedom, where freedom is a lived experience, rather than nothing but an idea. The autonomous individual is the testament of the species, Prometheus unbound, the eagle no longer able to devour his liver.

We are not engaged in a battle of ideas, as some would have it; we are engaged in a real war of real lives. One way or another, religions have to accommodate the individual, and it is always an uneasy accommodation, because every religion, by its very nature, presupposes submission to a negating principle. Daniel Dennett recounts:

I went out of my way in my book to address reasonable religious people and I test flew the draft with groups of students who were deeply religious and indeed the first draft incurred some real anguish and so I made adjustments and made adjustments. It didn't do any good in the end, because I still got hammered for being rude and aggressive. And I came to realize that it's a no-win situation. It's a mug's game. The religious have contrived to make it impossible to disagree with them critically without being… really. Oh, you know that they sort of play the hurt feelings card at every opportunity, and you're faced with the choice of, well, …am I going to articulate this criticism, or am I  just going to button my lip and write.[11]

To argue from religion, any religion, is by definition a fraught enterprise given that its premise is irrational. Christians, for example, claim they have a “personal relationship with God,” the same god that holds them personally responsible for the sins of others long dead, who, presumably, also had personal relationships with that same God, who passed their sins on to their progeny. As if that were not bad enough, God then made one person die for the sins of all the others. That is some personal relationship.

Muslims, at least, do not claim to have personal relationships with the Allah-Muhammad double act. They are all slaves of Allah fused in a generic Muslim slave colony, which precludes any personal views on anything. This is why Muslim political hustlers and jihad activists can offer to “deliver the Muslim vote” to any kafir politician or official willing to sell his soul, and there is no shortage of those.

It might be that Protestantism centrifuged the individual out of the Catholic mass, but it took lengthy and bloody wars to accomplish that. Christianity cannot claim to have bequeathed the individual to the world. Religions that posit elevating cycles of death and rebirth, i.e., reincarnation, have a stronger claim on personal relationships with gods than monotheisms, because such cycles are only about the individual believer, who enters the highest state of being in his or her own time, when they are ready, and not when God decides for everybody: OK, time’s up!

Yet the Western Left-wing intellectuals and the people whose minds they shape truly do believe that Islam is a religion of peace and that all that Muslims want is to practise their Shari’a amongst themselves.[12] What can be more reasonable than that? Such kufaar sincerely believe that if we are nice to Muslims, then they will be nice to us, the German Princes Syndrome, one might say. Our example of tolerance is so compelling that even the ISIS monsters and their monstrous "cubs" will be persuaded to give up their ways and join hands with us, their targets, in peaceful coexistence. We are aware that Muslims are, "the people who follow Islam," but somehow we are unaware that "follow Islam" means to be commanded to kill the infidel, and if they cannot do that, then to hate the infidel, and if they cannot do that, then to deceive the infidel, but whatever the case, they are strictly commanded to never befriend the infidel.

They are citizens, we hear; we must welcome them back, these citizens who have flung their accursed kafir passports onto great bonfires upon joyous arrival in their beloved caliphate. Muslims have kept the warring and killing and raping and plundering and lying going for 1400 years and, finally faced with such an excellent example of goodness as ours, will be so impressed that they’ll become model citizens. This is not only narcissistic conceit, it is power delusion, and it puts whole nations, not to say an entire civilisation, in peril.

In 1979, Roger Waters and David Gilmore wrote and performed the world-acclaimed Pink Floyd hit song Comfortably Numb, from their album The Wall. It was impossible not to be moved by the tortured perceptiveness of every aspect of the song, especially its lyrics and breathtaking guitar solos. In response to seeing the Security Barrier between Israel and Judea and Samaria for the first time in 2006, Waters reportedly moved his scheduled Tel Aviv concert to the altered states village of Neve Shalom. Firmly on the Israel-is-an-apartheid-state train, it’s been rapidly downhill ever since.

In 2010, Waters managed to cleave We Shall Overcome onto the Palestinians’ “resistance” as Song for Palestine. The quintessential pacifist hymn was pressed into service for a people that finds affirmation and happiness in premeditated bloody violence, glorifies mass murder and eulogises child sacrifice. We Shall Overcome was indeed sung by the oldest generation of anti-apartheid campaigners, but it would have been more fitting had Waters, instead, chosen the more authentic Senzeni na? (What have we done?), sung by that same respected generation.

Have the hallowed Palestinians ask that question, and it immediately transports the mind to the 1920-21 Muslim massacres of Jews, and on to those Muslim massacres of Jews in 1929, the Muslim killing sprees of 1936-38, to the Kfar Etzion massacre in 1948, until the outbreak of Israel’s War of Independence, not against the British, who were leaving or had already left, but against local Arab Muslims and five jihad armies invading from neighbouring Arab states. But the question of what they have done is not fully answered. We can throw in at least twenty-three Muslim terrorist mass murders perpetrated between 1970 and 2016, including two major and two minor bloody reigns of terror, so-called Intifadas. This is to say nothing of the random knife attacks and car attacks, the near constant rocket attacks and incendiary kite and balloon attacks. What have we done? Quite a lot, it turns out, if you don’t ask Roger Waters.

Watching the video of Song for Palestine, I wish I could ascribe the image of a baby’s hand clutching the Palestinian dagger-map of Israel to simple naïvety on the singer’s part. But then I remember that this was the brain behind the legendary Pink Floyd, and I am moved to wonder whether, in his mellowing years, Waters has become demoralised, or whether he has simply become comfortably numb.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W. B. Yeates, The Second Coming (excerpt), 1919.


  1. Saajid Lipham, Shocking Views of Shabir Ally, YouTube, 3 February 2021. Dr Shabir Ally has too much integrity to be a Muslim. Fortunately for him, his integrity has extricated his intellect from its submission to revelation, i.e., dogma. He employs his intellect to skirt around dogma, violating the basic Islamic relationship between dogma and intellect that Lipham describes. In consequence, Shabir Ally now pronounces things about Islam that are incompatible with that relationship. There is hope that Shabir Ally will sooner or later tire of playing this game, and his integrity will eventually extricate him from Islam altogether.

    This is what horrifies Saajid Lipham so much. Lipham, too, has too much integrity to be a Muslim. His real problem, though, is that unlike Shabir Ally, Lipham has completely negated himself. Saajid Lipham is the ultimate victim of Islam. The Muslims who attack Lipham also attack Ally. These are the Muslims void of integrity, and are self-serving enough to not submit their intellects to revelation. They will know when it's time to jump ship. Saajid Lipham's honesty threatens to blow their cover.
  2. Hugh Fitzgerald, UK Will Segregate Imprisoned Jihad Terrorists, Jihad Watch, 21 February, 2022.
  3. Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844.
  4. Intelligence Squared, Brave New World vs Nineteen Eighty-Four featuring Adam Gopnik and Will Self, YouTube, 12 February 2018.
  5. George Orwell,  Orwell’s Final Warning; A picture of the future, theJourneyofPurpose TJOP, YouTube, 18 April 2020.
  6. "Say: Travel in the land, and see the nature of the consequence for those who were before you! Most of them were idolaters," Qur'an 30:42.
  7. Abdullah Sameer, Ali Dawah - Apostate Prophet "Debate" Review, YouTube, 17 February 2022.
  8. Rami Dabbas, Coronavirus Vs. the Virus of Islamic Jihad, Israel Today, 23 April 2020. I know the figure of 270 million also from a different source that I am now unable to locate.
  9. denton.2@osu.edu, Review of Who killed more: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, by Ian Johnson, MCLC RESOURCE CENTER. "The idea was to create China’s own Sputnik—harvests astronomically greater than any in human history. This might have resulted in no more harm than local officials’ falsifying statistics to meet quotas, except that the state relied on these numbers to calculate taxes on farmers. To meet their taxes, farmers were forced to send any grain they had to the state as if they were producing these insanely high yields. Ominously, officials also confiscated seed grain to meet their targets. So, while storehouses bulged with grain, farmers had nothing to eat and nothing to plant the next spring. ...Compounding this crisis were equally deluded plans to bolster steel production through the creation of “backyard furnaces”—small coal- or wood-fired kilns that were somehow supposed to create steel out of iron ore. Unable to produce real steel, local party officials ordered farmers to melt down their agricultural implements to satisfy Mao’s national targets. The result was that farmers had no grain, no seeds, and no tools. Famine set in. …When, in 1959, Mao was challenged about these events at a party conference, he purged his enemies. Enveloped by an atmosphere of terror, officials returned to China’s provinces to double down on Mao’s policies. Tens of millions died."
  10. George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays, Victor Gollancz, 1940, p183.
  11. Daniel Dennet, The Four Horsemen: Discussions with Richard Dawkins, Part 1, YouTube, 23 February 2009.
  12. Jihad Watch offers a detailed and disturbing multi-part series by Michel Onfray on how far intellectual degeneration has gone in France.