Reaction to Reaction

Submitted by Khachkarian (United States), Nov 25, 2013 at 21:51

Political Islam was bound to come into serious conflict with Western society sooner or later. On a global scale, the world has witnessed a kind of repeat of the Islamic "revolution" in Iran in the late 1970s, when leftists allied with Islamists in the name of some vague "progress, overthrowing the "reactionary," secular Shah. In that microcosmic scenario, the leftists were turned on by their erstwhile Islamist allies and wiped out once the coup was accomplished. Only now, the Islamists' leftist allies are mostly Westerners, not Iranian communists and socialists.

Most contemporary historians identify the Iranian overthrow of the Shah as a "revolution," and yet it brought to power the most reactionary people in the world. Islamism IS reactionary, because it seeks to establish rigid, dogmatic theocracy everywhere. But still, Islamists are branded "revolutionary." If today's Islamist atrocities were committed by Christians or Jews, one can only imagine the worldwide leftists' cries and accusations of "reaction!"

We have reached a point in the West where "profiling" of Muslims is increasingly becoming a real police practice, and however many innocents get caught up in heavy-handed police methods in the US, France, etc., there is no alternative to this development in the immediate term. The Muslim world will NOT "police itself." Even the nicest, most tolerant, least pious, civilized Muslims in places like Turkey tend to shrug off the acts of terrorists even as they admit that such people are their "co-religionists." They seem to greet the whole dilemma with a smirk, as if it's "nothing to do with me that people are doing monstrous things in the name of the religion to which I profess to belong." So, consequently, the West has to step up and take the actions that Muslims are unwilling to take - to "reform" the last great "unreformed" religion in the world.

The cluelessness and gullibility of the West in interpreting Islam is nowhere more evident than in the treatment of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. In retrospect, this crime against humanity should be viewed as having been a variant of jihad, because the perpetrators wiped out the Armenians first and foremost because they were not Muslims. Once this atrocity - the "Great Crime" to Armenians - is treated as a genocide by all civilized countries, there will at last be an acknowledgment that a mass extirpation of Christians by Muslims was the first Holocaust of the 20th Century.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".