Omid Parsi

It's Islam, stupid...

It is often claimed that Islam means "Peace". The word "Islam" however, to those who understand even a modicum of Arabic, transliterates into "Surrender". Of course "surrendering" to domination is a form of achieving "peace", as opposed to "not surrendering" which implies "annihilation". That is what is meant by "Islam", in whose totalitarian mindset "peace" and "surrender" are synonymous as a matter of sincere fact.

In what follows I shall briefly discuss my views on the salient aspects and core philosophy of Islam, or Islamism, as an active ideology with geopolitical agenda; how it relates to the historical failure, impotence, and finally rage and frustration within Muslims in general and Iranians in particular; where it is headed, and, finally, how in the current intellectual climate of the West it has been laxly understated, or rather wholly misunderstood and underestimated to catastrophic effect.

The ideas expressed herein are general, straight-forward statement of fact, interpretations of fact, or visceral reactions to fact, aiming to dissect the Islamic mindset and its consequences through its legacy.

For the sake of utmost clarity, no attempt whatsoever is made at political correctness. The purpose of this writing is to put forward certain important, yet heretofore scarcely discussed, hypotheses to provoke independent thought and lively debate. The subject of Islam is approached as de facto rather than de jure, demanding a mental discipline whereby all anecdotes and window dressing about the fantasy of "true" Islam, its wonderful "moral virtues", its "just" prophet and his "noble" deeds are willfully discarded and ignored as rubbish. Anyone intolerant of an open, damning discussion of what their inherited "faith" considers "sacred" may choose to stop reading here.

Having endured half a lifetime of direct personal abuse and insult to my intelligence, I firmly believe that I owe absolutely no gratuitous "respect" to Islamic "faith" and its adherents, whomever and however numerous they may be. If I may in the process earn the lslamophobic label, or beget more onerous reactions or threats from Islamic fanatics, so be it.

the totalitarian religion

Islam's monotheistic concept of "One God", which is heard ad nauseam nowadays in cries of "Allah is Great" ("Allah-o-Akbar") and "There is no God but Allah" ("La Elah y El Allah"), is God-speak for "My Way or The Highway". These slogans are the ancient battle cry of the sword-wielding Arab in his conquest to spread the Mohammedan cult. They connote the very same ominous sentiment of belligerence today.

Islam is a one way street for those converted, and a no way street for those born into the "faith". Its punishment for heresy or apostasy is either death or torture-induced repentance. Hence Islam's "spirituality" is of the same genus as "fear" and "terror". Also synonymous in Islam are "force" and "reason", as evidenced by Mohammed's storied vandalism of all the idols in Mecca as a "public relations" strategy to launch his campaign of spreading his cult of "Allah".

Any creed that obliges its followers to engage in a corporal ritual of submission five times a day is inherently totalitarian. The oppressive indignity of "Namaaz", Islam's ritual prayer of kneeling before "God", arguably a subliminal act of "doggy-style" psychosexual submission, is designed to eradicate any vestige of individuality and independent thought in its subjects.

The "Namaaz" ritual is itself orchestrated by "Azaan", the nauseating call to prayer delivered in the moronic Arabic drone of Bedouin invaders. Blasting out of every minaret in every mosque in every neighborhood in the Islamic lands no less frequently than five times a day, the "Azaan" is a constant reminder of duty of the surrendered to submit and serves to perpetually drown out thoughts out of line with the "faith".

Islam's totalitarian recipe for "life" inserts the religion's authority between every person and his basic needs. It controls nourishment of its subjects by prohibiting intake of food, unless the food is deemed "Halaal". Every year, for an entire lunar month, the faithful are forced to practice "Roozeh", a day-long starvation drill.

Nowhere however is Islam's humiliation and moral disembowelment of its subjects so extreme as in its monopolistic brokerage of intimacy and regulation of sexual attraction through imposition of mortal taboos. Islam rules that females and males be bred in extreme separation so come adulthood it can uniformly dictate its commoditized terms of reproductive union to its subjects and ingrain itself, generation after generation, as the sole instrument of inter-gender human relation. In one of Islam's foremost freakish paranoias, any contact whatsoever between unmarried and unrelated ("naa mahram") male and female subjects is deemed fraught with the uncontrollable risk of sexual transgression and strictly prohibited. The only acceptable form of social contact with the opposite sex under Islam is that which is sanctioned by religious authority within the framework of one of many forms of "marriage".

Females are to be covered from head to toe in public, silent and invisible to everyone but their immediate kin and male masters. Males are circumcised so the trauma of mutilation can remind them throughout their lives that their organs too are the property of their faith.

Of course, true to its obsession with sexual matters, the weightiest and most severe of Islam's rulings pertain to actual sexual intercourse. Islam applies the juiciest of its punishments, namely public stoning or beheading, to those who commit what it defines as sexual crimes, such as adultery ("zina") or same-sex sodomy ("lavaat").

Interestingly, as a matter of necessity and a tremendous measure of remission, Islam offers a sinister Faustian deal-sweetener to adult males whereby the religion of "Only One God" legitimizes polygeny of "Up To Four Wives" in addition to unlimited religiously sanctioned temporary "liaisons". Hence, in return for being good soldiers, gentlemen of Islam are treated to the right to engage amply in all manners of "Halaal" fornication to their hearts content, subject only to the limitation of their means.

Enforcement of Islam's mostly sexual taboos ("Amr bil Ma'ruf & Nahyi anil Munkar") is the foundation of Islamic "culture" as it transforms the society into a cesspool of "god-fearing" gossip-mongers, spies and thugs, all competing tooth and nail to satisfy their urge for Schadenfreude, "titillation" and "salvation" by prying deep into whatever is left private in each other's lives in order to uncover punishable sins and misdemeanors.

Fittingly, transgression or "perversion" in Islam is defined broadly enough to produce a steady stream of "sinners" for the dark reality show of meat-grinder Islamic Justice known as "Sharia".

The public and graphic delivery of Islam's perverted concept of "justice" ("Qisas") is meant to serve the dual purpose of pornographic snuff entertainment for the masses while at once terrorizing them into submission. That is why the barbaric "Sharia" rulebook is brimming with public lashing, dismemberment, stoning and beheading as punishment for what Islam considers to be a crime.

True to its name, the religion of submission was designed to spread and expand its territory through "Jihad". Islam's psychopathic Jihadist fantasy extrapolates its power, present time and territory to almighty, forever and the entire world respectively. Hence everything and everyone, anytime and anywhere, is deemed subject to its domination and retribution.

This tenet, concerning subjugation of non-muslims, has lived on, unrevised and unmoderated, well into the present globalized and interconnected world of 21st century and to disastrous effect. This is how the mere rumor of slighting the Prophet Muhammad in a literary book that the vast majority of ignorant or illiterate Muslims can't read, or in a cartoon they cannot comprehend, published in a continent they cannot locate on map, is enough to mobilize of the firebrand ragged mobs in every wretched corner of the Islamic wastelands to call for the blood of distant infidels ("kafir").

Last but not least, Islam's "holy" book, the "Quran", has always been claimed to be the final, direct, unedited and unadulterated word of God and Islam's perpetually living miracle ("Mo'jezeh"). As a result the never-edited Quran has served as a "Poison Pill" for Islam's ancient franchise, having once and for all closed any possibility of reform or revision as paramount to challenging God himself.

In the end, if one were to acknowledge a single miracle for Islam, it would have to be the amazing alchemy with which it has succeeded in transforming otherwise ordinary people into ignorant ant-, cockroach- or scorpion-natured creatures for most of its 14 centuries of existence.

bedouin origins

Despite its claim of "universality", every aspect of Islam reeks of the uniquely depraved and primitive life of its originating nomadic Bedouin warrior tribes, well-adapted to harshness in one of the most inhospitable climates in the most barren desert regions of the world. The Bedouins' only contact with civilization was through the banditry they regularly unleashed on merchant caravans connecting the Orient to the Occident. It is rather telling that the prophet Muhammed himself, undoubtedly the most worldly of the Bedouin aristocrats, was illiterate.

The story of the spread of Islam is that of various Bedouin warrior tribes, united under the cult of Muhammad, breaking out of their inhospitable habitat into Persia and Byzantine North Africa in a looting journey, ambushing and ransacking the defenseless agricultural communities on their path.

recent history

Ever since the end of the colonial period, life in Islamic lands has been on a path to chaos and madness in a hypocritical, often farcical, attempt to at once co-opt and repel Modernity; to eat the cake of civilization while baking it in the oven of Islamic piety. It was always just matter of time before this madness would spill over and challenge the civilized world.

The creation of the state of Pakistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran, both disastrously failed or failing states, are clear historical milestones in a trend which have taken Islam and Islamism from a regional nuisance to a formidable global menace.

Islam's ill-fated encounter with Enlightenment and Modernity never did, as it seems never could, result in any viable form of absorption, coexistence or positive synthesis. This, by the way, is in stark contrast to the ways in which the Far Eastern religious philosophies of antiquity have at once dispelled colonialism and mastered modernity today.

While there are discredited whines and excuses cited for the present wretchedness of the Islamic world, chiefly Colonialism and Zionism, it can no longer be denied that Islam itself, the big VIP elephant in the room, should bear the main responsibility. Islam's hardcore totalitarian approach to life ought to be a readily discernible mammoth obstacle to achieving sanity, stability and progress for peoples of Islamic faith.

This bit of intuitive reasoning is of course anything but new and was not lost to the few Western-inspired progressive statesmen of the creed, most notably Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, Reza Khan of Iran, or Gemal Abdel-Nasser of Egypt, who forcefully suppressed Islamist retrograde forces to create modern secular states in the opportune circumstances of the post WWI world order or the aftermath of colonial retrenchment,

For decades, such regimes, succeeded to varying degrees in substantially and somewhat irreversibly advancing the cause of Modernity and Development in the Islamic world. However, to the extent that they failed to reach "escape velocity" with dismantling the Islamic belief system and its menacing institutions, they left the door ajar for the pernicious machinations of Islam's power hungry clergy and assorted retrograde Islamofascist forces to reenter the fray.

Tragically, Iran's modern secular regime fell to the Khomeinist revolution of over 30 years ago, opening the Jihadist can of worms and inspiring full blown insanity throughout the wretched Islamic World. Since then the West has gone through every stage of a deepening conflict with the Islamic world, from suffering a string of occasional terror attacks abroad, to 9/11, to "War on Terror" and two full-fledged costly and unsuccessful overt military and "nation-building" conquests in two far-flung regions in the Islamic sphere. In spite of all this "shock and awe" and "winning hearts and minds", assorted rogue Islamist forces, both state and non-state actors, have continually attained greater power and freedom amidst chaos and confidently advanced the "education" of pious Islamic barbarism to create a never ending supply of suicidal Jihadist foot soldiers.

civilization's response

Meanwhile, in our present day offend-no-one intellectual climate, Islam itself keeps getting the benefit of the doubt, if not a VIP pass, as a "major", "holy" "world religion", regardless of how outrightly hostile its doctrine is to modern human civilization.

It is commonly argued that all major world religions (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.) are convergent on the fundamental basis of humane and noble morality. It is now fashionable to make such claims about all widely held belief-systems of antiquity. Even if that were more or less generally the case, it does not take a genius to point out that Islam is different. While other religions offer "teachings", Islam has "rules". "Religion" may be the "Opiate of the Masses", as Karl Marx once famously stated, but Islam must be their "Crack Cocaine" ....

The fact that most Muslims are just average folk and seemingly "decent neighbors" is often used as an excuse to avoid polemic confrontation. By this logic the Nazi militancy should have gotten a free pass because the vast majority of Germans did not serve in the SS!

But the leaders lead and the masses mostly follow. That is how the world has always worked and it is no different now. Any totalitarian ideology is born by a select few but implemented on the back of hollow, complacent masses mostly going about their daily business while giving their meek and quiet approval. Democracy is only an ongoing experiment to introduce some rationality into this historical process by imparting some responsibility to masses.

While ruinous modern totalitarian ideologies such as Communism or Nazism were adamantly fought head-on in the intellectual as well as military and geopolitical fronts, Islam, an active expansionist totalitarian belief-system with unreformed barbaric ethics, gets a complimentary pass as quintessentially "divine" because no one dares argue with the masses of believers and their "God"...

Generally speaking, religion, culture, beliefs and temperaments are not just a sideshow.
They may not lend themselves as nice inputs into a quantitative macroeconomic or demographic model of why a good part of our planet of slums is brimming with insanity, wretchedness and violence. Denying the determining importance of beliefs and ideas in evolution of society is the zombie intellectual legacy of Marxism, itself a bankrupt political philosophy that once morphed into a populist ideology taking over half the world to disastrous effect.

The barbaric 9/11 attacks brought home to the West the end result of decades-long complacency in acknowledging the threat of Islam. The urgent response was termed "War on Terror", taking the West to military misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, where, I would think, it should have learned a thing or two about the scarcity of "universal values" present in the ignorant peoples it purported to "liberate", along with nasty complications in "winning their hearts and minds".

Incidentally, the honor of kicking the "global" Islamist menace into high gear goes way back to none other than Khomeini, who openly put a contract ("fatwa") for the head of Salman Rushdie, a British citizen living in Britain, and author of a literary novel that hardly anyone, let alone the effectively illiterate Islamist clergy could make heads or tails of. Amazingly, instead of responding with a formidable threat of retaliation, the Thatcher government opted to exile its own citizen author to go underground in his own country. This, by the way, was the very same Iron Lady who showed ultimate resolve in going to war Argentina to defend its ownership of far-flung Falkland Islands.

The impotence of the supposedly powerful West to assert itself and its "values" and face off threats has had already had dire consequences. The US has the military might to fly drone bomber aircraft to take out Jihadists right from the sky above remote corners of the world, but is seemingly lacking either the intellectual might or intellectual honesty to realize or admit that their enemies are not bred by socio-economic or political "circumstances", but religious and cultural traditions that breed generation after generation of losers and underachievers, a good deal of whom turn into Jihadi psychopaths.

In the wake of the most recent major political upheavals in the Islamic world, wishfully, or should I say foolishly, termed "arab spring", it is high time the civilized world set aside political correctness and rancid multiculturalism and formulated a strategy to take on the very religion that breeds barbarity and hatred and poses a grave challenge to its peace and stability.