Another aspect of Political Islamists’ culture of death is the willingness to annihilate entire categories of opponents, and the openness to declaim this willingness, together with the drive to attain the requisite operational capability and weaponry. The euphemistic suicide bombing should really be called what it is: proto-genocide bombing, or more simply, as Canada’s former Justice Minister Irwin Cotler has said, genocide bombing. Genocide bombers targeting civilians are saying that any people in a given country, or adhering to a particular non-Islamic creed, are fit to be slaughtered. Each genocide bombing, beyond the actual murders it perpetrates, symbolically mass murders everyone else it could have targeted, and is an installment in an ongoing assault of, if the perpetrators had their way, a stream, perhaps an unending torrent of genocide bombings. Political Islamists have avowed and sometimes centered their political programs around eliminating, even killing, entire categories or enormous numbers of people—sometimes in the millions—among the groups or peoples they designate as enemies. When genocide bombers slaughter such a targeted group’s members, the bombing’s meaning and intent becomes that much more unmistakable.
Political Islamists responding to something as seemingly trivial in the world of politics as the Danish cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, published in 2005, with a wave of violent attacks on Western institutions, burnings of buildings, and killings, as well as calls from many, leaders and followers alike, for the mass murder of those who, in their view, insulted or defamed the Prophet. Calls to slaughter Islam’s putative enemies, such as “Death to Denmark” in Pakistan, were the protests’ commonplace. More specific death threats against publishers and cartoonists alike, including a $1 million bounty for the murder of the Danish cartoonist, seek to silence those whom Political Islamists declare as enemies and to intimidate others into silence.
A complementary event occurred shortly thereafter, with an august protagonist ordinarily treated with reverence or at least utmost respect. In a university lecture in Germany in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI made an inept attempt at comparative religious enlightenment, in which he quoted a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor’s deprecating statement about Islam, in order to claim Christianity as the religion of reason. Leading Political Islamists in different countries greeted this with calls to kill or imprison the pope. Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin of the Supreme Islamic Courts Union, the Political Islamic party that was ruling most of Somalia, declared at Friday evening prayers: “We urge you Muslims wherever you are to hunt down the Pope for his barbaric statements as you have pursued Salman Rushdie, the enemy of Allah who offended our religion.” Proceeding according to Political Islam’s logic, Malin told the Muslim faithful that this applied not only to the pope: “Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim.”8 The Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella organization for the Political Islamic insurgency in Iraq, led by Al Qaeda, issued a statement threatening the pope and, because of him, all Christians: “We tell the worshipper of the cross (the Pope) that you and the West will be defeated, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya.” What’s more, “we shall break the cross and spill the wine. . . . God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. . . . (May) God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen.”9
What do these and other such responses to a few uncomfortable, perhaps objectionable words tell us about this movement’s murderousness? Never before in our time have significant religious and political leaders publicly called for the pope to be killed—and to be sure, many Political Islamic leaders, knowing the diplomatic catastrophe it would be to join this murderous chorus, contented themselves to echo, often in strikingly inflammatory terms, the common Political Islamist condemnation for the pope. This was all accompanied by church bombings, some killings, threats against Christians in Iraq and elsewhere in the Political Islamic world, seemingly incessant and absurd invoking of the Crusaders, finger-pointing at Christians’ real or alleged past crimes, and more. Mohammed Mahdi Akef, the Political Islamic Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Leader, said that Benedict’s remarks “threaten world peace” and “pour oil on the fire and ignite the wrath of the whole Islamic world to prove the claims of enmity of politicians and religious men in the West to whatever is Islamic.” Threaten world peace? Whatever one thinks of the pope’s statement, the reaction was so wild, so disproportionate, so rhetorically and physically violent—so quintessentially Political Islamic. Ill-chosen words, provocatively chosen words, an expression of, in the world of polemics and politics, rather mainstream views—inspired Political Islamists to threaten the pope with death.
It is not only some putatively blasphemous cartoons or words that put people in the crosshairs of Political Islamists. They also have standing targets. Hamas, as are other Political Islamic governments, movements, and leaders, is armed with a hallucinatory antisemitic and murderous Political Islamic ideology and practice, formalized in its charter. This hefty manifesto—which Hamas has repeatedly reaffirmed, especially its core annihilative element—explains to Palestinians, other Arabs, and Political Islamists around the world (and Westerners paying attention) Political Islam’s orientation toward Israel and the “imperialist” powers supporting Israel. In a Nazi-like antisemitic cascade of accusatory fancy, Hamas’ charter casts Israel, Zionism, and Jews (used interchangeably) as seeking “to demolish societies, to destroy values, to wreck answerableness, to totter virtues and to wipe out Islam.” Zionism even “stands behind the diffusion of drugs and toxics of all kinds in order to facilitate its control and expansion.” Hamas’ charter calumnies Jews for a vast catalog of invented crimes against humanity, going to the antisemitic continuum’s most outlandish end of maintaining that “there was no war that broke out anywhere without their [the Jews’] fingerprints on it.” The charter explains that the Jews plan to subjugate the entire Middle East as a stepping stone to turning on the world. According to the charter, all Palestine, which includes all Israel (and lands beyond), must succumb to Hamas’ uncompromising Political Islam. Israel, of course, must be destroyed. As the charter, a call to arms, says in its first paragraph, “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.” The eliminationist ideology, which echoes countless Political Islamic documents and leaders’ statements, could not be more explicit, recalling past successes as a spur to redouble efforts toward its intended future one. They do not seek to destroy just Israel, the country. The Jews’ very presence in what Political Islamists deem Muslim land must be reversed. The charter is clear: “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.”
The genocidal and apocalyptic charter declares: “Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”10 Allah’s promise is the Palestinians’—indeed all Muslims’—command. Showing that Allah’s promise pertains beyond Israel, governing Political Islam’s desired treatment of all non-Muslim peoples, Mahmoud Zahar, Hamas’ cofounder and later its foreign minister, declared to Italy’s Il Giornale in February 2006 in reference to the cartoons, “We should have killed all those who offend the Prophet,” a genocidal principle common among Political Islamists, as those calling for killing Pope Benedict also enunciated, that obviously translates into killing anyone ever offending the Prophet.m
Destructive fervor is central to the Political Islamists’ worldview. It can be seen in Hamas’ refusal to tame itself after assuming the responsibility of governing. Hamas, under crippling diplomatic and financial pressure, defiantly and loudly holds dearly to its charter and its Nazi-like antisemitic and eliminationist tenets. Its views of Jews and its desire to annihilate Israel, and by definition a good part of its peop
le, if not Jews more broadly, place Hamas squarely within the Political Islamist mainstream and its regimes and insurgencies. The antisemitism animating Hamas, demonizing Jews to a degree that would comfortably fit within Nazism, overflows the airwaves and print media of Political Islamic countries and groups, existing in similar form across the Political Islamic world, indeed even in much of the Islamic world, among leaders and followers alike. This unmistakable antisemitism cannot be confused with or written off to even the most expansive and liberal notions of antagonism toward Israel’s policies. Bin Laden, in his speeches, interviews, and videotapes, repeatedly speaks of Jews and of Jews around the world as Islam’s enemies, repeatedly invoking Quranic verses to justify his and his followers’ enmity, not for Israel the country, but for Jews the people.11 The international Political Islamist superstar Hezbollah’s Nasrallah has explicitly driven the point home that for him and other Political Islamists, Israel and Israelis are not the issue. They hate Jews. According to Nasrallah, “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.”12
Political Islamists construct not just Jews, or even chiefly Jews, as demons to be eliminated. Their principal animus and aggression is directed at the West and its greatest power, the United States. They see Israel mainly as the imperial West’s outpost, a Western-backed insurgency against Political Islam, making annihilating Israel the first step in a general eliminationist assault on the West. Bin Laden’s and Al Qaeda’s overwhelming focus, and the target of their mass-murdering and general eliminationist strategies, has not been Israel, which according to bin Laden, Britain and the United States established “as one of the greatest crimes, and you [the United States] are the leaders of its criminals.” That is why “the battle is between Muslims—the people of Islam—and the global Crusaders.”13 Even Hezbollah’s Nasrallah, who is single-mindedly focused on his struggle with Jews and Israel and extending his Political Islamic control over all Lebanese, sees the United States as the ultimate enemy, as he broadcast to the world on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television shortly after the one-year anniversary of 9/11: “Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan [America] is absolute. . . . I conclude my speech with the slogan that will continue to reverberate on all occasions so that nobody will think that we have weakened. Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America.”14 No less than the original Political Islamic Iranian leadership after the Iranian Revolution did, the current Iranian leadership under Khamenei sees the United States as Public Enemy #1, even if Ahmadinejad’s statements receiving the most play in Western media and achieving the most notoriety have been about annihilating Israel and its people. Like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and others, the Iranian regime, as Ahmadinejad tells us, thirsts for revenge against the “arrogant” West:Unfortunately, in the past 300 years, the Islamic world has been in retreat vis-à-vis the World of Arrogance. . . . During the period of the last 100 years, the [walls of the] world of Islam were destroyed and the World of Arrogance turned the regime occupying Jerusalem into a bridge for its dominance over the Islamic world. . . .
This occupying country [i.e., Israel] is in fact a front of the World of Arrogance in the heart of the Islamic world. They have in fact built a bastion [Israel] from which they can expand their rule to the entire Islamic world. . . . This means that the current war in Palestine is the front line of the Islamic world against the World of Arrogance, and will determine the fate of Palestine for centuries to come.15
It matters not that this account of Israel’s founding purpose, its role in the Middle East, and United States’ and other Western countries’ designs is hallucinatory. Political Islamists fervently believe it. It is a central tenet of their ideology. To Political Islamists, the West has for centuries constricted, humiliated, divided, and dominated the Muslim nations. This must now be reversed. Ahmadinejad is murderously explicit: “Our objective is to annihilate all corrupt powers that dominate our planet today.”16
If among nonstate actors, bin Laden and Al Qaeda most formidably exemplify contemporary Political Islam, among state actors it is Iran’s Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and the ruling Guardian Council, including in their dogged efforts to fund, arm, and support Political Islamist groups, governments, and insurgencies wherever they can—Hamas, Hezbollah, Shia shock troops in Iraq, and elsewhere. Ahmadinejad’s notorious Holocaust denial was no act of a rash militant, but the sober act of a calculating and supremely confident political leader, seeking to undermine the legitimacy of Israel. More than merely profoundly antisemitic, it is a symbolic political gauntlet, a declaration to the West that he, Iran, and Political Islam seek to overturn what is understood to be truth. It is a declaration to establish whom is owed moral respect, and who will determine acceptable politics’ contours. It should have been no surprise that Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial came as warp to his Hitlerian exhortation’s woof—a commonplace among Political Islamists—that Israel should be “eliminated from the pages of history” (it has been more commonly rendered as “wiped off the map”)17 and his confrontation with the West over restarting Iran’s nuclear production aimed at building a Political Islamic bomb.
This mass-murderous rhetoric, though shocking to Western publics, is entirely consistent with the genocidal rhetoric and proto-genocidal violence that Political Islam’s vanguard, especially Hamas and Iranian-controlled Hezbollah, has long practiced with genocide bombing. The Political Islamic Sudanese regime has slaughtered millions and expelled additional millions over more than two decades. Al Qaeda’s mass-murderous intent and deeds need no belaboring. Imagine if, that September morning, Al Qaeda had had a deliverable “Islamic bomb.” When contemplating this, we should recall Al Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith’s subsequent published explanation: “We have the right to kill 4 million Americans—2 million of them children—and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of the [Americans’] chemical and biological weapons [sic].” Sheikh Nasir bin Hamid al-Fahd, a leading Saudi cleric, issued a fatwa in 2003, with careful Quranic justification, religiously sanctioning using nuclear weapons as “permissible,” in just retribution to kill up to “ten million” Americans.18
Not just Americans and other “infidels” ought to fear Political Islamists’ eliminationist designs. And it is not just the elites that take part in the eliminationist discourse, which also is powerfully present in Political Islamic media, in the countries beholden to the creed, and at the grass roots. Maajid Nawaz is a former leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Political Islamist movement banned in many countries. Since leaving the movement, he has been warning of Political Islam’s danger. Because of the harm he has done, he is now “duty-bound to redress the phenomenon of politically inspired theological interpretations.” Hizb ut-Tahrir formally preaches nonviolence to achieve Political Islamists’ goals of destroying Israel, overthrowing non-Political Islamist regimes in the Islamic world, and establishing a transnational Political Islamic caliphate. Yet the movement’s literature, Nawaz explains, contains an ideology that inexorably produces violence. He points to one of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s basic texts, from its founder, Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, which maintains that all Muslims must wage war to overthrow “every single Muslim government, then forcibly unite them into one military state even if it means killing millions of people.”19
Three successive Iranian presidents have publicly called for Israel’s annihilation and the effective mass murder of hundreds of thousands or millions. Falsely depicting Ahmadinejad in this respect as an Iranian “radical,” his call that Israel be “eliminated from the pages of history,” together with Iran’s drive to develop nuclear weapons, echoes “moderate” former presiden
t and continuing Iranian power broker Hashemi Rafsanjani’s more elaborate account from December 2001 of the underlying thinking of Iran’s Political Islamic leadership. “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” Here Rafsanjani dispassionately considers a genocidal policy’s implications. One nuclear bomb dropped on Tel Aviv would effectively destroy geographically tiny Israel. He gladly declares to his nation and the world that the costs—including hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Iranians dying from Israel’s nuclear retaliation—would be worth it. In the context of the heightened confrontation over Iran’s constructing its own nuclear capability, Iranian clerics following Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, Ahmadinejad’s spiritual adviser, after years of withholding support, issued a fatwa in 2006 justifying the use of nuclear weapons.20
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