Many thanks to Gary Fouse for translating this article from the Swedish news site Samtiden:
Learn From Ahlmark — Islamism Must Be Treated Like Nazism
by Dick Erixon
October 23, 2023We now see how Islamists make many Swedes want to strip off what identifies them as Swedes. We begin to submit to their demands, which is exactly what is their intention is with this mindless violence. Islamism must be equated with Nazism, just as former People’s Party leader and minister Per Ahlmark saw it.
One who early on understood Islamism’s terrible power and threat was Per Ahlmark. I gladly single him out because he cannot be accused of being conservative or something that the Left sees as terrible.
Crystal clear on evil
When he passed away in 2018, at age 79, I cited him from his acclaimed book, The Left and Tyranny (which came out in a new edition from Timbro in 2003 when I was working there). In it he is crystal clear on Islamism’s evil. This is what he wrote in the preface:
“The view of international terrorism has become the focal point in a partially new battle of ideas concerning our civilization. Above all: the third totalitarian worldview in the last hundred years has now emerged with strength and clarity. After communism and Nazism, we see how Islamic fundamentalism is placing similar demands upon us. We must adapt ourselves to its claims that do not allow for objections, pluralism, or compromises […] The three ideologies demand to rule the world and are all intent on genocide. They despise freedom, reject democracy, and hate Jews. The Islamists’ methods, therefore, are uncontrolled violence.”
See Islamism as contemporary Nazism
I completely agree with him. We should see Islamism as a political ideology bearing the same evil as Nazism. It is not a religion. It is an ideology that makes brutal demands on us in the West. We are to submit ourselves to their will, with bloody violence if necessary.
We who live in the secularized world can make the distinction between Muslims who in private and for their part follow Islam’s teachings. In this connection, it is usually said that “jihad” can be interpreted as an inner struggle or striving in every person to live a better life. In this form Islam can exist in the West.
But when you make jihad into a fight to impose sharia law upon “infidels”, meaning to force Christian civilization to submit itself to Islamism’s extreme interpretation, then it is a political movement as dangerous, violence-glorifying, and totalitarian as Nazism.
Taking the threat seriously
After the terror act last Monday against two Swedes in the colors of the soccer team, all authorities must drop the political correctness that excuses Islamists.
Last weekend I read the book From the Frontlines of Terror (Mondial 2023) by Magnus Ranstorp. He shows the astonishing reluctance of Swedish authorities to understand the threat posed by terror-promoting Islamists. For example, he tells of the “Rosengård Report” from 2009, in which he participated for the Defense Academy. It highlighted the infiltration of Swedish associations and authorities by Islamists, but received a lot of harsh criticism for being “Islamophobic”. Even the head of Säpo [Security Police] fell for the outrage of the Left and the media and considered the report exaggerated, despite the fact that the security police who knew Rosengård stood behind what was reported.
Just a few years later, Ranstorp was terrifyingly right. As a proportion of the country’s size, Swedish citizens were the third-largest group in Europe who joined the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, where they beheaded, burned people alive, and took women as sex slaves.
If we don’t see Islamism for what it is, we may see the same brutal violence in Sweden. Then we have barely seen the beginning.
Re: “Learn From Ahlmark — Islamism Must Be Treated Like Nazism”
Indeed it must, and as reality removes the blinders of native Swedes, one suspects that such views will become ever more common.
In these tumultuous times, it is easy for rhetoric to become overheated and hyperbolic. However, there is a sound historical basis to link the behavior of Muslims to that of the National Socialists of Germany 1933-1945. Books can and have been written about the subject, but in brief, two threads of evidence provide enough linkage between the two to make the argument sound.
As many regular readers of this website know, the Nazi Party entertained the prominent Arab Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husseini as an honored guest during much of the war, after Husseini had fled the Middle East following the abortive Arab Revolt in British-Mandatory Iraq. At the time, Husseini was perhaps the most-influential pan-Arabic leader in the region, perhaps even in the world ~ and he was also a mainstay of the Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood and its mission and ideology.
The party heavyweights enthused over the charismatic Husseini, who apparently charmed no less than Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler and similar figures, ultimately meeting with Hitler himself.
The Nazi Party ultimately provided a lavish home, staff of servants and a chauffeured private automobile for the Arab leader, and installed him on state-run radio to broadcast propaganda to the Middle East and Arab world, whose millions of Muslims the party hoped to persuade to join the war on the Axis side.
Husseini ultimately became involved in the planning for the so-called “Final Solution,” as a participant in the Wansee Conference and elsewhere. And when the plan was put into action, Husseini quickly became well-known for his exhortations to exterminate the death camp inmates even faster and more-rapidly.
As the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Husseini had considerable influence over Muslims in the greater Islamic world. As such, he was able to help raise enough Muslims from the Balkan nations (primarily Croatians and Bosnians) to form the Waffen-SS 13th Mountain Division “Handscar” (Scimitar), an all-Muslim unit within the combat arm of the SS-Gestapo. The 13th Mountain later attained infamy for a series of atrocities committed during various “anti-partisan” operations in the region.
Amin al-Husseini himself should have been tried at Nuremberg, but thanks to British and French authorities looking to court favor with Arab populations in the post-war Middle East, he was allowed to slip the hangman’s noose and escaped to die of old age in the 1970s.
Before dying, al-Husseini lived long-enough to witness the Black September terrorist attacks upon the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. He had more than a passing interest, thanks to the fact that his grand-daughter married one of the leaders of that group.
A second line of evidence linking Muslims with Nazism comes not from the past, per se, but from the present and the fact that “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”), Adolf Hitler’s magnum opus, remains a best-seller in many Middle Eastern nations, particularly translated into Farsi and Arabic.
It has always been logically incongruous that so many modern Europeans profess support for the Palestinians ~ some of whom undoubtedly regard Hitler as a hero ~ while also claiming to be anti-fascists and anti-Nazis. But then, history has a way of mocking people’s pretensions now and then, and this seems to be one of those times.
Regardless of this, there can be no gainsaying the fact that the Koran, the holy book of Islam, calls upon Muslims to wage eternal war upon the kafirs (infidels), namely all that do not profess to believe in the one true faith and their prophet. Whether one is Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu or secular does not matter: To a devout Muslim, all reside inside Dar al-Harb, “The House of War” … until they recant and say the shahada or submit to Islamic supremacy, or are slain as enemies of the faith.
The British asked the French (who administered Egypt after WW2) to extradite al-Husseini to face war crimes charges, but they refused.
There is enough blame to go around among the Anglo-American Allies ~ I’m including the French here as well ~ when it comes to letting al-Husseini escape the hangman’s noose.
The French were no real position to make demands upon the victorious British and American governments who had so recently liberated their country. They did not ask forcefully-enough, in other words, for the fugitive Arab leader to be handed over to them.
Neither power, France nor Britain, wanted him all that badly, again because of the need for realpolitik regarding the Arabs in their respective colonial territories. And Muslims as well.
I am speaking not just of the Middle East, but of the post-war Indian independence movement, and the subsequent partition of greater India into Pakistan and India. Husseini was influential not just in the Middle East, but around the Islamic world. London and Paris let him slip the noose for that reason.
Realpolitik was in play with the Americans, too, please do not misunderstand: The survivors of the Bataan Death March died of old age before seeing justice done. Why? Because post-war, the U.S. needed Japan’s support in the Cold War, it was decided, so potentially embarrassing wartime episodes such as that atrocity were disappeared down the memory hole.
Justice denied is an ugly thing, no matter who is responsible.
I reject the idea that there is a distinction which can be made between muslims and islamists. A muslim who follows the teaching of their religion faithfully is not compatible with western secular life. The sole purpose of islam is to spread and dominate. While obviously all muslims are not violent savage murdering barbarians on the surface, the outpouring of support and vile calls for genocide against the Jews shows me that it would not take much to turn peaceful into murderous. It is naive to think otherwise.
@ Bastet
Re: “I reject the idea that there is a distinction which can be made between muslims and islamists.”
You are right to reject that idea, which has been problematic at best and disingenuous at worst, from the very start. Mainstream media talking heads can appear sophisticated and knowledgeable when they use such terms as “Islamist,” but in reality, they are the intellectual equivalent of fast food; there is no real intellectual sustenance there. No real transfer of useful information.
Maybe that is the point in the first place, to obscure and obfuscate what seems to be pretty straight-forward and unambiguous. Namely, the violent and aggressive nature of Islam where the non-Muslim world and its inhabitants are concerned.
It is also germane to note that Muslims themselves do not use terms like “Islamist” to describe themselves. Nor do they distinguish between “moderate” and “immoderate” Muslims. As Turkish President Erdogan said some years ago, they (Muslims) find such terms “offensive” … and he went on to say “Islam is Islam, and that’s it!”
“A muslim who follows the teaching of their religion faithfully is not compatible with western secular life.”
This is the secret which lies at the heart of Islam and its relationship to the kafir, the infidel, the non-Muslim. The more-devout a Muslim is, the greater his/her obligation to wage jihad against the unbeliever. Contrary to the claims of fools like George W. Bush, the members of al-Qaeda and other “terrorists” are not “extremists” existing at the periphery of Islam; they lie at its very heart.
The great Dr. Bill Warner, Ph.D. has noted on many occasions that Islam is by its nature deceptive and two-faced. This dual nature is part of its remarkable success over the centuries in outwitting its enemies and subverting those whom Muslims wish to conquer and subdue.
Consider the pious old Muslim living in down the street, who has never hurt anyone or caused any trouble. He is emblematic of the “peaceful” or “moderate” Muslim we hear about in the media. in theological terms, he is probably a Muslim who lives according to the first (earlier) or Meccan portion of the Koran, in which Mohammed coexisted with others and taught tolerance and non-violence.
The trouble is that under sharia law the second half of Mohammed’s life, the so-called Medinan portion of the Koran, in which he becomes a warlord and conqueror who calls for violence and conquest against unbelievers and infidels, supersedes or overrules the earlier, peaceful parts of the Koran via the doctrine of abrogation.
Strictly-speaking, that pious old man is not being completely faithful to the core tenets of his faith. Or if he is doing so, he is doing so in secret.
This is a very real problem for westerners who are confronted with significant Islamic populations in their neighborhoods, towns, cities and nations. How are the dangerous Muslims to be distinguished from the peaceful ones?
And that doesn’t even get into the problems which result when Muslim migrants who are themselves peaceful have children who become “radicalized” ~ to use the term adopted by the authorities in Europe ~ and run off to join ISIS or some other jihadist group.
Clearly, the only reasonably certain path of safety for non-Muslims is to separate themselves from the Islamic world to the greatest extent possible. Which is what Christendom did for well over a thousand years. The Saracens still attacked them, but at least Old Europe had not thrown open the gates to their would-be invaders in the way that has happened over the last half-century or so.
It is no accident that as the Christianity of Old Europe has waned into post-modern secularism, modern Europeans increasingly find themselves ill-equipped to cope with the threat facing them. Nor is it accidental that the nations of Eastern Europe who are dealing the best with this problem are the most-strongly Christian nations left on that continent, i.e., such as the Visegrad Four countries (Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia).
A number of years ago I had a Jewish friend who insisted that it was important to be tolerant of muslims because there were so many who were peacefully living their lives side by side with Jews in New York City. I tried to explain the duplicitous nature of the religion but to no avail. She would not even consider the idea and we soon parted company. This is what we face today, that same mindset of the good muslim.
One ought to ask where these pro palestinean protesters who call for death to Jews learned their hate? In the university? Or at home? It is noteworthy that they will not even acknowledge the barbarism of what hamas did, rather they extol it. These are not people with whom one can have a rational conversation or co exist with.
Are people so afraid of being called ‘islamophobic’ that they refuse to acknowledge the reality of what they are seeing being played out before their eyes? Call me islamophobic and I will just shrug.
I actually wonder if My Kampf is a forbidden book because if someone reads it and the Quaran and Hadith, they would notice, how much the former has taken from the latter two. Just making it a more modern version.
Of course they do
Mein Kampf is rumored to have been written by the Jesuits. After all, Hitler organized his SS army by the principles of the Society of Jesus.
@Etwas?
Re: “I actually wonder if My Kampf is a forbidden book because if someone reads it and the Quaran and Hadith, they would notice, how much the former has taken from the latter two. Just making it a more modern version.”
I am aware of no historical evidence which links Adolf Hitler’s writings directly to the contents of the Koran, or for that matter, the Hadiths or the Sira. However, having said that, it is well-known that he at least thought about Islam somewhat, for he stated in his writings that he wished that the Moors (Muslim invaders) had triumphed at the Battle of Tours in 732 in north-central France, rather than the Christian armies of Charles “The Hammer” Martel.
For the next thousand years, the pivotal victory at Tours assured the survival and ascendancy of European civilization as explicitly Christian in its ethos and belief. Since Herr Hitler regarded Christianity as weak and corrupt, and Islam as the proper creed and faith for warriors, that was the source of his displeasure.
It is germane to note that there are those who try to link Nazism (National Socialism) with Christianity, usually as an obvious means of discrediting the latter. During the consolidation of his power in Germany in the early-mid 1930s, the German Fuhrer made political and other overtures to both everyday Protestants and Catholics and their clerical leaders.
This was done not because Hitler and the Nazis were Christians, but because of how numerous Catholics were in southern Germany and Bavaria, and how numerous were Protestants in northern Germany. Once he seized absolute power under the Enabling Act of 1933 and became Fuhrer ~ the absolute ruler of Germany ~ he could again disregard Christians or not as he chose.
Indeed, many leading Christians inside Germany were later repressed by the state or even sent to concentration camps, especially if they were active dissidents (such as Martin Niemöller or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the latter of whom died in Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April, 1945).
The leadership cadre of the Nazi Party were overwhelmingly secular or pagan in their spiritual beliefs. This did not, however, prevent them from cynically using Christian iconography and language to appeal to German public opinion and emotion. “Got Mitt Uns” on the belt buckles of soldiers and so on.
Stalin did very much the same thing in the USSR. He brutally repressed Russian Orthodox churches and priests before the war, but when he needed to mobilized public opinion behind his regime and against the invaders after Operation Barbarossa, he suddenly was friends with the Russian Orthodox church again, and allowed those churches to open and hold services. When the war was won, he reverted back to the ante bellum status quo. The party and state couldn’t very well allow such an important source rival for the loyalty of Russians to continue to prosper, now could they?