Perspective
I’ve been swimming in the depths of Islamic hatred for non-muslims for way too long now. I’ve been scanning message boards, foreign media, arabic papers, and scholarly works by former Muslims who have fled their former faith. I have no special insight beyond what anyone else can get with enough time and effort. My opinions are not springing forth from a void here.
The intensity and passions of a religious war have largely been lost to Westerners for centuries (with one notable exception which I’ll come to in a moment). The barbarism and horror of the middle ages are so far in our past, few people today can really appreciate the intensity of hatred summoned by religious convictions. Thanks to reforms in the primary Western Religion, we don’t fight these types of wars anymore.
Our conflicts, for several centuries, have been mostly economic or nationalistic. We fight for things that can eventually be negotiated and settled, and the changing times blunts the edge of these conflicts until a few generations later, we wonder what all the fuss was about.
Today, we look at the Final Solution of Nazi Germany and wonder at how such a horrible aberation of human behavior came to pass. We still argue and debate the origins of a compulsion to exterminate six million human lives. Our history has detached us from a very ugly truth.
The hated of Nazi Germany was NOT an aberation. It was a common human failing, returned to us from a long vacation. The Final Solution was an impulse from our past, married to the industrial age.
Had such means been available in the 1500s, Europe would have largely been depopulated by various flavors of Christianity feeding each other into ovens or gas chambers.
Religious hatred is not new. It is not rare. And it is not finished with us yet.
The blessing of being free from this hatred for so long is also the curse of not recognizing its return.
In the 1940s, the Jews were the subjects.
Today, we are all Jewish in the eyes of Islam.
We couldn’t understand the hatred in Nazi Germany. And now a few generations have went by and we can’t even remember Nazi Germany. We think we can negotiate with blind religious fury. We listen to the rhetoric and discount it – after all, who takes religion that seriously anymore?
And we forget human history is dominated by the thinking of the Final Solution. The peace and prosperity of the past few hundred years is the exception to our existence, and that exception could very well be drawing to a close if we do not recognize the hatred returning to the world.
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Filed under: Islam
And herein lies the crux of the problem in America today. There is hardly anyone left alive who remembers or truly understands having one’s life on the line with absolutely NO chance of negotiation. The last major example of this here was the Civil Rights Movement and the slavery years that lead up to it. I shudder to think what will happen when there is no one left who actually lived through that horrible time when a human being could be set upon and killed where they stood, because they were different and it was a God-given right to exterminate them. America is forgetting what true danger is really like. Out of sight, out of mind syndrome.
Many Americans today judge everyone else in the world by the way WE think, the way WE react, what WE’RE capable of. They have no idea what “mind set” means. Just because we believe in compromise and negotiation over all, they’re sure everyone else must as well. If we pull every US serviceman out of every foreign country, ignore all things overseas, smile, wave, and send the world nothing but good cheer, join hands and sing kumbaya, the world will be at perfect peace. Right.
Planet Earth will still be blown sky high one day because of the unrelenting religious hatred for others that other governments insist on harboring for years. Decades. Centuries. (If the nuclear weapons suddenly popping up don’t do it first.)
Just as with the Final Solution, today’s religious fervor wants no negotiation, because it’s not about peaceful co-existance, and it never was. It’s about wiping the slate clean.