In recent columns (see, e.g., here and here) and on our podcast this week, I’ve tried to explain that the barbarity of the attacks against Israel and Jews by sharia-supremacist Hamas is deeply rooted in Islamic scripture, which jihadists construe to be as applicable today as in the seventh century. Terrorism is not what happens when warriors get carried away in the heat of battle; it is the objective of jihadist war to vanquish perceived enemies by terrorizing them: gruesome murder, maiming, rapine, pillaging – these are the point, not the periphery.
This is simply a fact. Western progressives would avert our eyes from it by maligning anyone who points it out as a racist “Islamophobe” (invoking the artifice coined by the Muslim Brotherhood to discourage critical study of its ideology). Hard leftists — very much including those on American campuses, who’ve been taught to despise their country as a white-supremacist, colonialist dystopia — make common cause with sharia supremacists based on their loathing of the West . . . even though these same leftists would not last five minutes if they actually found themselves in a sharia-supremacist society.
It’s one thing to hear this from detached analysts, admonishing from our comparatively safe distance. It’s quite another thing, a far more powerful thing, to hear it from someone who has lived it and risen above it. So, yes, read every word of this learned and poignant essay by the great Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Daily Mail. But make sure to read this part twice:
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, I spent my early years escaping political strife after my father was imprisoned for being an anti-government activist. We moved between countries before settling in Kenya.
The worst insult in the Somali community was to be called a ‘Jew’, not that any of us actually knew one. To be called a ‘Jew’ was so abhorrent, some felt justified in killing anyone who so dishonoured them with this ‘slur’.
As a teenager in Nairobi in the 1980s, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood — the strict Sunni Islamist movement, founded in Egypt in 1928, from which Hamas ultimately descends.
I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques, cursing Israel and praying to Allah to destroy the Jews. We were certainly not interested in a peaceful ‘two-state solution’: we were taught to want to see Israel wiped off the map.
When I was 16, my school’s teacher of religion was Sister Aziza. She read to us the Koran’s lurid descriptions of the everlasting fire that burns flesh and dissolves skin — the place reserved for Jews.
Sister Aziza described Jews as physically monstrous, with horns coming from their heads, out of which flew devils that would corrupt the world. Jews controlled everything, she told us, and it was the duty of Muslims to destroy them.
It was a lot to take in for a teenager who read Western romance novels in secret, but I believed every word….