The destruction of the World Trade center towers was not the first instance of this sort of terrorism carried out by ‘Muslim extremists’, either. The previous World Trade center bombings, the U.S. embassy bombings in Lebanon, and later on in Tanzania and Kenya, as well as numerous attacks around the world—in India, in Israel, and most recently throughout Europe can also be traced to militant forms of Islamic Extremism aimed at establishing a world Islamic Order. The loss of life, disruption of peace, and socioeconomic devastation caused by these attacks throughout the years is not easily quantifiable, but is of an order of magnitude significant enough to warrant further inspection into the phenomenon which today’s media has conveniently dubbed “violent extremism”.
This paper will systematically present evidence and rationale in support of the notion that Islam is a primarily political doctrine which, when taken in a fundamentalist sense, lends itself well to a culture of military conquest intent on establishing a theocentric and totalitarian Islamic order upon the secular and democratic Western world. The methods behind the attempt to Islamize the West (with its symbolic head being the U.S.) will be shown to be a combination of terrorist violence carried out through Jihad in the name of Islam, and an unholy and dualistic alliance with the radical political left based on a common goal of eliminating the current capitalist order, in favor of elusive notions of ‘social justice’ and other forms of collectivist thought, allowing for Islamists to sabotage the U.S. from the inside with little or no resistance from the government and/or the people.
In order to commence a proper analysis of the role of fundamentalist Islam in the dualistic alliance between Islam and the Left, it is first necessary to define the framework of our analysis: the language we will use to properly identify the concepts we are dealing with. First we will aim to clarify and differentiate between the concepts of Extremism and Islamism, leading into a discussion of the fundamentalist nature of the Islamist and ultimately to a discourse on the various methods of Jihad, and on the Leftist radical policies which enable it.
Violent Extremism V.S. Islamist Terrorism
At its base level, extremism refers to propagation of ideas far removed from what is perceived to be the political center of a given society, or otherwise in violation of common ethical and moral standards. The issue with using the term ‘violent extremism’ is that it “omits any mention of Islam whatsoever” (McCarthy, 28). In addition, the modifier ‘violent’ presupposes that ideological forms of extremism, which do not necessarily involve immediate violence, but are just as extreme in nature, are not a part of the problem being discussed. (McCarthy, 28)This is a dangerous omission, seeing as ideological extremism is just as hell-bent on conquest as its violent counterparts. Statistics show that a disquieting number of Muslims, while perhaps not agreeing with methods of violence, do hold that “sharia always and everywhere should be law”. (McCarthy, 29) Thus it is quite apparent that we need a means to distinguish between those who encourage violence in order to spread an Islamic order across the globe, and those who don’t but share the same aims, as well as differentiate those who are devout peaceable Muslims with no precepts towards Islamic subjugation of the west from all previous categories.
