Author’s note: This is something I wrote awhile back, and which I published in my second volume of my Mohammad cartoons. It’s an issue that is very important to address and to correct — if we’re ever going to begin to fight this war honestly. 

9/11: Act of Faith/ Act of War

I can’t say how many times I’ve heard the words “Islam is NOT a religion!” from hysterical religionists who are more concerned with defending religion than they are of defending the West against a religion. Islam is a religion, and it’s evil, and that’s not a contradiction. There is religion and there is morality, and the two are not the same, even though many conflate the two, particularly those who believe that religion is inherently good, which we all know isn’t true, particularly the religious. 

If your main concern is protecting religion from being associated with something as evil as Islam, then you’re in the way of victory. We’re going to have to deal with the problem of how religion, any religion, gets instant respect by virtue of the fact that it’s a religion. And the way to deal with that is not to pretend that Islam isn’t a religion, but to accept that religion can be evil.

I read a book years ago entitled Lone Survivor, by a former Navy SEAL named Marcus Luttrell. He was the lone survivor in the title, after he and his four man Navy SEAL team allowed a few Muslim goat herders to go along their way after they were discovered in the woods of Afghanistan, on a mission to kill a jihadist leader. And the decision to let them go was the last decision that three of the Navy SEALs would ever make. And part of what sealed their fate was that Luttrell, in making his decision to allow the Muslims to go their way, invoked his “Christian Soul” in doing so, as opposed to his “Warrior Soul.” 

Luttrell also argued with his unit that if they were to kill the goat herders, that it would be all over CNN. Their lives were in the balance, and he was concerned about what a corrupt, anti-American propaganda “news” channel would report about them. And those Muslim goat-herders ratted out the Navy Seals as soon as they could, leading to a battle to the death that enraged me for days, and still does whenever I think of it. 

It’s religion that fuels the Islamic enemy, and it’s religious altruism and secular altruism, which has allowed this enemy to remain unexamined, and therefore undefeated. Religion is why we’re losing against a very defeatable enemy, from the enemy’s religion, to the West’s inability to take on a religion. 

Some people have told me that Islam is not a religion because it does not contain Christianity’s tenets of “Love your enemy” and “Turn the other cheek,” but instead says “Kill the infidels wherever you find them.” Yet some Christians today understand these precepts in a way that calls for pacifism and surrender, and amounts to suicide, especially in wartime in a nuclear age. This attitude is no more moral than “kill them wherever you find them”; while jihadis follow a homicidal ethic, many in the West follow a suicidal one. And the jihadis love, to the death, that we are such suckers. 

Religion can inspire moral behavior and it can inspire for evil behavior, but the problem is that because Christianity is the dominant religious tradition in the West, most of us believe that religion cannot advocate for anything other then moral behavior, no matter what we all see to be true, that religion can lead some to commit the most obscenely unspeakable acts of evil imaginable, but done in the name of “good.” Christian altruism not only teaches Christians to sacrifice for others and to live for others, but leads to the ultimate form of altruism, which is to die for others. For some Leftist Christians, this means surrender of Europe and North America to Islam. If you think that’s extreme, consider how most of us in the West can live with the deaths of our fellow Westerners, as no matter how many are murdered by jihadists; jihad goes on unabated, with no rallies demanding our leaders to end it once and for all. 

That religious altruism, coupled with the secular altruism of the left, where all others are viewed as better and more important than us, has led to our submission to this enemy, and will ultimately lead to our self-destruction, if it’s not pushed back on in a serious way.   

In different ways on both sides, religion that’s motivating a war against civilization, and it’s respect for religion that has allowed the religious enemy to get away with mass murder. 

When George Bush lied to himself and the world after 9/11 (he knew that he didn’t know anything about Islam, but he flapped his gums anyway) that “Islam is peace,” what this born-again Christian was really saying was that “religion is peace.” He was unfit to lead us after 9/11, and we’re still paying for his refusal to see reality for what it is. And still there are prominent and influential individuals who bite their tongue about Islam, lest they suffer scrutiny for their own religion. And then there are secular people who condemn Bush, but who believe the same crap, that Islam is not the Islamic enemy’s ideology, and that the problem is a so-called political form of Islam. It’s not politics that leads individuals who kill themselves in order to murder others. Only religion can lead people to do that, and to believe that there’s some heavenly reward for their act of evil. 

After particularly horrific jihadist attacks, as the victims are still dying, callous Muslims run to the rescue of Islam to pretend that Islam has nothing to do with the attacks, and callous religionists run to the rescue of religion, pretending Islam is not a religion.

Islam is religion, it is politics, and it is a fusion of the two. There is no separation of mosque and state in any Islamic country. Islam uses its religious identity as both a shield and sword. The West’s religious need to protect the very idea of religion has hurt our need to protect ourselves from an enemy who’s motivated by religion. Talk about skewed priorities, but it just goes to show how religion trumps reality and what needs to be done in our defense. 

Someone once argued with me, “When we fight Islam as ideology, we have the chance to win; no one can win with ‘religion.’” (Nigel Farage, whom I call Nigel Mirage because of his refusal to face reality, has peddled the same BS). We’re going to have to win with religion, especially this religion, because it’s the worst and most dangerous of them all, and it motivates a global war against civilization. Denying that fact, for religious reasons, is self-defeating, and is one of the reasons why this enemy remains undefeated so long after 9/11. The only way we’re going to win, in the end, is by recognizing the truth, telling the truth and ultimately acting on the truth. Islam’s religious nature makes it get away with more than any evil secular ideology could, and that fact should make even religionists admit the danger of religion, the danger of placing faith above reason. 

This defense of religion, as if it’s the end all be all, which leads some to deny the reality that Islam is a religion, brings to the forefront the problem with Western civilization’s attitude about religion. It’s our unwillingness to criticize religion or to condemn it (though there are those who condemn “all religions,” while never condemning Islam in particular), or even acknowledge that religion can be evil, and we all know religion can be evil, even the most blinkered religionists, which has made people either praise Islam — because it’s a religion — or condemn it, but only as a non-religion. However much religionists want to deny Islam is a religion, Islam has a prophet, it has a holy book and a God. All Muslims and the vast majority of non-Muslims accept it as a religion. Pretending Islam is not a religion now — in the middle of its religious war against us — does nothing for our efforts in defending ourselves against it, and allows it to get away with even more murder than it has. As I’ve often said: No one would fly planes into buildings if they didn’t believe — religiously — that they were committing a righteous act that would send them to heaven. In the end, when we finally end the Islamic threat, we will be more honest about what role religion played in Islam’s ability to get away with the evil it’s gotten away with for over a thousand years, and of our unwillingness and inability to deal with it when it came for us. If Islam weren’t a religion, then it would not have lasted as long as it has, and it wouldn’t be defended as it is by its would-be victims. And that’s a fact that we need to observe and think about, very seriously, instead of dismissing it as somehow irrelevant. 

As I wrote in my article, My Name is Bosch and I’m a Recovered Muslim:

Our altruistic concern for the future and well being of “the Muslim world” (as if it’s a different planet) has come at the expense of American lives and treasure. We’ve placed the well being of “the Muslim world” above our own self-defense. We’ve placed today’s big lie, “Islam means peace”, above the truth we need to act on. We’ve placed the lives of Muslim civilians above the lives of our soldiers, placing them in absolutely unnecessary danger in order to protect innocent (or guilty) civilians. Our Rules of Engagement might as well be renamed the Golden Rules of Engagement, as our soldiers have been forced to treat the Islamic enemy the way we’d like to be treated. And the enemy takes full advantage of the altruistic, and self-defeating, policies that our morally corrupt politicians have concocted. We need to shift the focus onto our own well being at the enemy’s expense for a change. 

Here’s an exchange I just had in the middle of putting together this piece, of someone replying to my article, Muslim Roulette, along with my reply:

“The author’s otherwise fine article reveals that he has yet to realize that Islam is NOT a religion. Islam is a violently expansionist, totalitarian IDEOLOGY that wraps itself in a facade of religious pretense. Any ideology that demands that non-adherents choose either conversion, enslavement or death is not a religion but a death cult and a cult is not a religion.”

I replied: “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who want to defend Western civilization, and those who want to defend religion, to the point that they’ll deny Islam its religious identity, in order to protect the reputation of religion. Islam is a religion and it’s evil, and that’s not a contradiction. People like you have done your part to prolong the Islamic enemy’s war on civilization for religious reasons. Until we accept the fact that Islam is a religion, that 9/11 was as much an act of faith as it was an act or war, this war will continue. But people like you wouldn’t mind that, so long as Islam isn’t recognized as the religion it is. Buck up. This is about defending civilization, Not religion.”

Islam is a religion.