Sinisterism and radical Islam
By Bruce Walker
web posted March 17, 2008
What, historically, do Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists and Fascists have in common? Evil, of course, is one answer. But there is more to it than that. These evil systems have common elements: (1) rejection of the ethical monotheism of Jews and Christians; (2) embrace of brutal totalitarianism; (3) the sort of cannibalism that was the show trials of Stalin or Hitler's Night of the Long Knives; (4) dishonesty celebrated as virtue; (5) profession of some variation of socialism.
These collectively constitute that I have called Sinisterism. It transcends what we call "ideology," and it is in fact the negation of any coherent system of ideas. Most often it appears as a hateful and irrational apparition of what we have come to call the "Left," but the whole idea of a spectrum of ideology – the invention of the French Revolutionaries and their "Left Bank," and of Karl Marx with his notion of laws of social progress – is itself a sham. Throughout the last century, Nazis were sometimes allies of Bolsheviks and enemies of Fascists. Mao turned harshly against the Soviet Union when it pleased him. Forget ideology and think power and violence and you have the black heart of Sinisterism.
Radical Islam is nothing more or less than Sinisterism. The present violence and mayhem of radical Moslems shows that kindred spirit of Moloch, but a closer examination historically of radical Islam shows just how tightly radical Islam fits into the molds of Sinisterism, beginning with what may seem to be the difference between radical Islam and those other forms of evil: religion.
Sinisterist Radical Islam is not ethical monotheism
Sinisterist Radical Islam may be a religion, but it is not a good religion. Fascism, Marxism and Nazism are religions too, but they are not good religions. Actually, everyone has a religion, even atheists. Everyone believes in something. Secularism is a religion just as full of true believers as any other religion. But radical Moslems believe in Allah, a living God, so how can they be secularists? The reason why is because all religions that believe in a supernatural God are not the same.
The Allah of Sinisterist Radical Islam is not an ethical or loving being. He enjoins his followers to lie and to murder. He is not a Blessed Creator but rather simply a Creator. He is worshipped solely for his power. The God of Jews and of Christians is a Blessed Creator and a loving God. Jews at a Pesach Seder dip their finger in the wine glass and then set a drop of wine aside on a napkin to diminish the pleasure of drinking wine because it is a sin to rejoice in the suffering of others. When the Sea of Reeds closed in on Pharaoh's armies and the Israelites rejoiced, the Blessed One admonished them "Why are you joyful? My children are dying." The God of Christianity so loved humanity that He entered the world as a baby and He was tortured and murdered to save all sinners. Allah not only makes no sacrifices for humanity, but he is happy when "sinners" are trapped and condemned to Hell.
Sinisterist Radical Islam believes in conquest, rapine, murder, enslavement and every other wicked pleasure that totalitarian secularists want. Sinisterist Radical Islam just wants power. We do not have to go back far in history to find suicide bombers who believed in Heaven: Japanese Kamikaze pilots were deeply religious, believed in Heaven, and worked for a monstrous evil. There were no Jewish or Christian suicide pilots because the Blessed Creator of Jews and of Christians loves life and believes all human souls have great worth. Perhaps it is easier to understand Sinisterist Radical Islam if we think of it as the perverted Emperor worship that caused the Japanese, an otherwise good people, to commit some of the worst crimes in human history in the name of religion. Why did they do this? Their religion itself was bad. Sinisterist Radical Islam itself is bad. All supernatural religions are not the same. The Great Faith – the Judeo-Christian faith – preaches belief in a Blessed Creator who is loving, merciful and true.
Other theistic religions, like the religion of Imperial Japan, the religion of the Aztecs, the religion of Sinisterist Radical Islam, are religions of hatred and violence. These religions positively enjoin their followers to murder, enslave and torture others. Not all religions are equal. Many religions, like Zoroastrianism, Baha'i, Sikhism and other forms of ethical monotheism clearly improve the ethical character and decency of those who follow their faith truly. The Great Faith, the Judeo-Christian faith, profoundly influences human character for the better. Sinisterist Radical Islam does not. It turns lands that were once centers of prosperity, learning and diversity into realms of the underworld.
Even within this faith there are lies. As an example, those who profess to be radical Moslems in today's war on terror and who commit suicide attacks in the name of Allah often are Communists, which means that they are overtly and emphatically atheists. This fact, which is self-contradictory if Sinisterist Radical Islam is a real religion, is repeatedly noted in the harrowing contemporary account of Moslem terrorism by Brigitte Gabriel in her book, Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America. The title to her book also perfectly describes what Sinisterism is and that Sinisterist Radical Islam can profess a belief in Allah while denying the existence of a Blessed Creator at all. Walter Laqueur in his 2007 book, The Last Days of Europe, notes that the murderous radical Moslems who rioted in France and have wreaked havoc over much of Europe in the name of Islam often were political rather than religious.
Sinisterist Radical Islam is a brutal totalitarianism
Fascism, Bolshevism, Nazism, Maoism, Radical Islam and other forms of Sinisterism are totalitarian. The only truth allowed in the truth of the Sinisterist faith is power. All these forms of Sinisterism have the same basic intolerance. There is nothing wrong, according to the co-religionists of Fascism, Bolshevism, Nazism, or Sinisterist Radical Islam, with controlling every aspect of life, including conscience. Sinisterist Radical Islam "tolerates" other religions in the same way that the Soviets "tolerated" Christianity, Judaism or Islam after the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, historically Moslems did not want to convert all of the conquered populations to Islam, because as non-Moslems they could be treated almost like slaves.
I worked with many Iranian Moslems during the period in which the Shah of Iran was under attack. What these well-mannered and quiet students thought and said astounded me. Hitler was a good man, to them, and the tragedy was that he did not succeed in the Holocaust in killing all the Jews in the world. That fit in perfectly with the strong support that Moslems gave to Nazism during the Second World War. They also believed that Stalin was a good man and that if Bolshevism was established in Iran "the streets would be paved with gold." It did not matter that Hitler was not a Moslem or that Stalin was an atheist who persecuted Moslems.
Sinisterist Radical Islam is cannibalistic
Cannibalism is a salient feature of Sinisterism. Sinisterist Radical Islam is cannibalistic. Throughout the history of Islam, and indeed, today, Moslems kill and torture and enslave other Moslems. No one, perhaps, killed more Moslems than Timer the Lame, also the greatest Moslem conqueror of all time. He literally built pyramids of skulls for the many cities in which he methodically murdered all, or nearly all, the people who lived in these cities. These cities were almost always Moslem.
Sinisterist Radical Islam, like Fascism, Bolshevism and Nazism, preaches transitory alliances. Different groups of Moslems murder each other one day and form an alliance to murder third parties another day. It is not accidental that today Moslems work closely with North Korean Marxist atheists against Jews and Christians, who are "peoples of the book." It is no accident that the Arabs, whose ethnicity is most closely associated with Islam, have the expression "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
This is just like all Sinisterists. As noted already, Fascists were one day friends with Bolsheviks and enemies of Nazis and the next day enemies of Bolsheviks and friends of Nazis. This cannibalism exists within Fascism, Bolshevism, Nazism and other forms of Sinisterism. Fascism purged itself of other Fascists. Bolshevism purged itself of other Bolsheviks. Nazism purged itself of other Nazis. Sinisterist Radical Islam purges itself of other Sinisterist Radical Moslems. The bewildering warfare within Sinister Radical Islam is explained best by a variation on the old phrase "Follow the money," to wit: "Follow the power." The purpose of Sinisterist Radical Islam is not just power, but crushing every internal and external opponent. There are no loyalties within it except an individual loyalty to the lust for power.
The pervasive cannibalism of Sinisterist Radical Islam is an important reason why Islamic nations fail. Although war against the unbeliever always is acceptable, the worldly pleasures that Islam embraces, the permission to lie and to murder and to rob are not the sorts of attitudes that can be carefully cordoned off so that only non-Moslems are deceived, murdered or robbed. A prime example of this is the savage and long war between Sunni and Shia. Many centuries since Christians peacefully resolved the Great Schism of Christianity, Moslems continue to kill and to persecute each other because of this schism in Islam.
Sinisterist Radical Islam embraces The Lie
Sinisterism is the Secular Religion of The Lie. Sinisterist Radical Islam worships lying which helps gain power. This does not just mean lying to non-Moslems but lying to Moslems whose beliefs are considered wrong. The willingness, even the eagerness, to lie makes Sinisterist Radical Islam fundamentally different from religions which embrace ethical monotheism. Judaism has 613 commandments and many of them relate directly to honesty. Christianity likewise emphatically embraces truth as a core principle. Zoroastrianism, even more dramatically, simply calls the forces of darkness and evil "The Lie."
The ability of Allah to transcend reason also makes Sinisterist Radical Islam open to endless quarrels about what Mohammed said or what Allah intends. The group with the most force wins those arguments. If there is no absolute truth (and Mohammed himself did not know whether he was going to Heaven or not), then Allah has created a capricious universe in which good and evil, truth and lies, mercy and sadism are all whims in the mind of Allah. Objective reality does not exist for radical Moslems, because Allah is able to transcend anything, any logic, any reasoning without exception. Islam is, in this sense, relativistic in the same sense that all modern nihilism is relativistic. The Allah of Sinisterist Radical Islam resembles, as much as anyone, Big Brother in 1984.
Sinisterist Radical Islam is socialist
Socialism does not just mean an equal distribution of income to all. It means that society or government ultimately owns or regulates everything. That is just what radical Islam proclaims. Interest or "usury" is outlawed, meaning that the business of finance is prohibited. War booty belongs to the state. Property cannot be used as an Islamic property owner wishes but according to what the state, guided by Islamic law, allows.
The founders of the Baathist Party were close allies of the Syrian Communist Party in the 1930s. Later these founders were considered too conservative and the Sixth National Party Congress in Syria adopted a program modeled after Soviet socialism. Hafez al-Assad, who later became virtual dictator of Syria, was trained in the Soviet Union and his nation received military aid from the Soviets. What was true in Syria was true throughout the Arab and Islamic world. The leaders of Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Libya and Iran (after the Shah) openly embraced socialism or redistribution of wealth. This is why private enterprise simply does not exist in any meaningful form in many or most Islamic nations. The idea of independence in the form of property ownership, even by Moslems, does not exist.
Moammar Qadafi, the dictator of terrorist and Islamic Libya, frankly calls the system which he has imposed upon his nation and recommends to others "Islamic Socialism." This includes government ownership of large businesses and control of smaller ones, support for public education, support for public health care. His Green Book is a conscious attempt to provide an Islamic equivalent of the Red Book of Maoism.
The Baath Party is overtly socialist. The Baath Party Constitution says that it is Socialist (Article 26), that there must be redistribution of wealth (Article 27), that the workers should manage the factories (Article 32), that the state shall supervise trade to prevent exploitation (Article 36), that Special Work Courts run by the workers and peasants would handle disputes with management (Article 40) and so forth. Beyond that, when it came to power in Syria, it was with the close collaboration of the Communist Party. In 1957 the army chief of staff was dismissed and replaced by General Afif al-Birzi, a prominent Communist. The Baath Party also worked very closely in Jordan with the Communist Party.
By the mid-1950s, the Soviets were not only supporting Arab and Islamic regimes, but Soviets were noting the "progressive" role played by the mullahs. Within the Soviet Union, Islam was accorded privileges that were not given to any other religions. As Walter Laqueur notes in his 1959 book, The Soviet Union and the Middle East, "Of all the world's great religions, Islam is perhaps the least dangerous rival from the Soviet point of view." The Soviets attacked the Shah of Iran for trying to limit the influence of Islamic clerics – certainly something odd if Islam is a considered a religion like Christianity or Judaism.
Saddam Hussein closely associated his version of the Baathist Party in Iraq with support for workers and peasants, for universal compulsory school education for children, for social welfare programs, for public health care and for land reform. Indeed, the biography of Hussein reads much more like the biography of Stalin than of Hitler. Like Cuba's Fidel Castro, Hussein told the world all the wonderful things that he did for his people. It was a lie, but to Sinisterists around the world this made him only more appealing.
Sinisterist Radical Islam is a sibling of Fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism
Almost as soon as the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War, individual Bolsheviks began noting that Islam was something different than a religion and that it was the duty of the world proletariat to give Moslems moral and political support. This was not something limited to the Arab world, but Indonesian Communist leaders were declaring that Pan-Islamism was a struggle against world capitalism and so should be wholeheartedly supported by the Bolsheviks.
This was coupled with an early Bolshevik hatred of Judaism. Even in the early years of Hitler, when Nazism was supposedly the mortal enemy of Bolshevism, the Bolsheviks agreed with the Nazis that Jews were exploiters of the working class in Germany. As Laqueur writes in his 1959 book "With the stimulus to Zionism given by the rise of Hitler, the Soviet and Comintern organs intensified their attacks on Zionism. Hitler's anti-Semitism was regarded skeptically; commenting on the April, 1933, boycott in Germany, it was said ‘In a few days you will find that all the big Jewish stores still exist, that Jewish bankers, capitalists and stock jobbers are still carrying on their businesses, and that no Jewish industrialist has suffered any damage."
The Soviets supported Palestinian riots against Jews both in August 1929 and the much more violent riots against Jews by Palestinians in 1936. The Bolshevik position was that the Jews were a privileged minority in Palestine and that the Jews had destroyed practically all Arab industries. The cause of the Palestinians, even as early as 1936, was described as an "heroic struggle."
Before the Second World War, Fascism was a defender of Islam and during the Fascist conquest of Ethiopia Moslems were some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Italian Fascist empire defeating the Ethiopian Christian empire. Mussolini proudly called himself "Defender of Islam." He supported movements in British occupied Islamic nations.
Nazism also had a close connection with radical Islam, and this was noted before the Second World War began. In 1938 R.H. Lockhart states in his book, Guns or Butter? that French, British and American businessmen, diplomats and journalists were writing home in letters and reports about the condition of Nazi Germany. Lockhart wrote that what appeared to be happening was a supreme conflict between Christianity and Nazis, the "new Islam," but that Christians lacked a Charles Martel, the Frankish king who stopped the Moslems at the Battle of Tours.
When Hitler came to power, Jajj Amin el-Husseini as Mufti of Jerusalem called for jihad to eliminate all the Jews in Palestine. Moslems were recruited and volunteered to serve in the SS Handzar Division, whose glories modern Sinisterist Radical Islam still praises. Moslems even helped run the ghastly Jasenovac concentration camp, where over 10,000 Jews and over 40,000 Christians were murdered by the Nazis and their Sinisterist Radical Islamic allies. Persian Shiite Moslems speculated that Hitler might be the Twelfth Prophet of Islam.
Most Moslems supported the Nazis during the Second World War, and these were not simply Arab Moslems, but Moslems in Iran, India and other parts of the Islamic world. During the Second World War, Gamal Abdel Nasser had supported the Nazis and tried to undermine the British war effort in Egypt. Moslem revolts against the British while Erwin Rommel was trying to defeat the British armies in North Africa were a constant problem for the British.
Certainly one of the oddest examples of how Sinisterist Radical Islam embraces the identical evils of Fascism, Bolshevism, and Nazism is the attitude of the Soviets toward Haj Amin al-Husseini. Until 1938, the Soviets considered this important Moslem leader as wonderful and Soviet policy had been to give him unqualified support. When he then began to get close to Mussolini, al-Husseini became a "fascist" agent. After the non-aggression pact with the Nazis in late 1939, the Soviets were again sympathetic toward al-Husseini. Then, when he seemed to side with the British in the Second World War, he became a "British agent." After the Nazis attacked Russia, when al-Husseini supplied troops to the Nazis, he became a "traitor." After the war was over, al-Husseini was elevated in Soviet eyes to national hero status. Al-Husseini had no problems collaborating gleefully with Bolsheviks, Fascists or Nazis and his attitude was reciprocated by all three.
After the Nazis lost the war, Nasser joined the Egyptian Socialist Party. Hizb Masr al-Ishtiraki and Khalid Mohieddine, a Communist, would play leading roles in Nasser's life and in Egyptian politics. What happened with Nasser was typical of what happened with many Arabs and Moslems who supported the Nazis and the Fascists during the Second World War. Laqueur notes that the fact that these Arabs and Moslems went overnight from being Fascists and Nazis to being full-fledged Communists was "freely admitted by Communist historians." During the Cold War, Nasser received the honors of Hero of the Soviet Union and the Order of Lenin. His socialism was ever-present. By 1962, Nasser required that the government own a majority interest in every single business in Egypt.
What was true in North Africa was true in the Middle East. Yemen signed a treaty of friendship with Fascist Italy in 1926 and then a similar treaty with the Soviet Union in 1928. Russia and Italy were the first two European nations to recognize the government of Yemen and the first Yemeni who visited Europe went to Fascist Italy in 1927. Although Yemen was pro-Axis in the Second World War, it signed another friendship treaty with the Soviet Union in 1955 and a similar treaty with Communist China in 1958. Are the Yemeni serious Moslems? Not only are they Moslems, but the rulers must be descendants of the Prophet or Sayyid.
The enemy we face
It has become a given that what we fight today is a religious and not a political war. The overtly atheistic Marxist regimes in Cuba and North Korea are as much the enemy of America and of Israel as are the nominally "religious" Moslem extremists of al-Qaida or Hamas or the deliberately secular Baathists, who happen to have ruled lands that were overwhelmingly Muslim, like Syria and Iraq.
Our enemies today are not somewhat like our enemies in the Third Reich, Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. Our enemies today believe in the same thing – power – and hate America, Israel, Christians and Jews as the strongest bulwark against their evil Sinisterism in the world. Until we recognize that Sinisterist Radical Islam is the old political horror that was Fascism, Bolshevism and Nazism, we will stumble in the darkness, unable to defeat what we cannot clearly see. 
Bruce Walker has been a published author in print and in electronic media since 1990. He is a contributing editor to Enter Stage Right and a regular contributor to Conservative Truth, American Daily, Intellectual Conservative, Web Commentary, NewsByUs and Men's News Daily. His first book, Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie by Outskirts Press was published in January 2006.