The truth of Islamo-Fascism

A good column from a former member of the Israeli government who attended a lecture by a former Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) member, "Ahmad", a few years ago. Since the column needs a subscription, I'll paste the relevant points here:

For the record, PIJ mostly recruits from the university crowd and its followers are, for the most part, the educated product of the middle-class. A terrorist must possess more grey matter than desperation in his arsenal if he wants to be truly successful.

Ahmad did not offer a view that followers of political correctness and multiculturalism-at-all-costs would consider consistent with their take on the roots of Islamic extremist terrorism. He declared unapologetically, "In our view, non-Muslims are insects, and it is quite within our rights as Muslims to rape, steal from, punish and kill non-Muslims as we deem fit." He described an insular existence that was motivated by a religious ideology so intolerant of anything not of itself, that no crime was too great in removing it from their vision of the world. The odd thing was, when he explained it, all you could understand on a certain level was how it all made sense.

PIJ's take on the world offered an exculpability greater than anything Noam Chomsky or his acolytes could dream up. Ahmad explained that they didn't need our ideological arguments to justify their Jihad. They are uninterested in our perceived culpability for their "plight" as many would have you otherwise believe. We are weak, meaningless targets for elimination regardless of how port or starboard we perceive ourselves to be on the political spectrum. To be a true PIJ (or HAMAS terrorist for that matter), you must first embrace the culture of non-Muslim xenophobia.

Ahmad's lecture taught us that terrorism cannot be eradicated by hugs and goodwill or even explained by this grievance or that. It doesn't know, nor want to know, what steps we can offer to help their so-called plight. While it can be argued that the West has made many foreign policy blunders, placing the blame for radical extremist terrorism solely and squarely on our shoulders is an exercise in self-delusion.