After last night’s murder of fifty people at a gay club in Orlando, politicians are rushing out their statements, most smart enough to avoid knee-jerk reactions blaming anyone but the shooter, and perhaps the group inspiring him, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Not all were so thoughtful.

I’m going to spare you my pledges of emotional solidarity with our gay brethren, or pious warnings not to blame Muslims in general for the hateful actions of a few. I’m going to assume you’re all adults and understand that ideologies and religions associated with mass murder — Communism, Nazism, and recently the fundamentalist Islamist groups — are all thought-viruses which prey on the susceptible. This is an assumption I may regret, since the topic is a minefield unless you stick to the mainstream channels of banal sentiment.

This is not a hot take, or an attempt to promote one political tribe over others by pointing a finger of blame. We don’t want peaceful people who happen to be Muslim to feel afraid — most people of every religion in every country don’t want to harm their neighbors. It’s the minority that does support harming others I will address.

In one of my thrillers, the scene for a future authoritarian security state in America is set by an atomic blast in Manhattan, the bomb smuggled in and detonated by an ISIS-style Islamist. Some of my younger readers suggested that might be racist! OMG! Here’s what I told them: your teachers are feeding you a sanitized, politically-corrected history. They should have explained to you that Islam is a relatively new political-religious system, born in fire and conquest, that killed millions and nearly overran Europe before it was halted by the Spanish Reconquista c. 1492 and the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the last time Ottoman expansion threatened central Europe. Muslim conquerors invaded India and subjugated most of the subcontinent, killing as many as 80 million Indians. All religions have some of the character of their founding population — Old Testament Christianity / Judaism had violent aspects, tribalism justifying killing of the Other. But the Enlightenment and growing humanism tempered these violent strains. Christianity, while often used as a pretext for violence and war, was truly a religion of peace — the New Testament Jesus, while not a complete pacifist, emphasized empathy for all and respect for different individuals, including nonbelievers.

Islam has its reformed subgroups. The Sufi are known for their depth of thought and peaceful philosophy. Sufis emphasize the inward-looking development of the soul, not outward expansion or worldly power — and not surprisingly, fundamentalist Islamist regimes have persecuted them, burning their mosques and killing them.

But Islam’s major sects are more recently informed by violence and conquest, and financing of Salafist schools and media by the Saudis and others has spread radical intolerance far beyond the desert wastes that spawned the Salafis. In Malaysia and Indonesia, for example, formerly easy-going multireligious societies are under increasing pressure from advocates for Sharia law.

And this is what needs to be explained to my idealistic young readers: while no one should blame all Muslims for the actions of the violent few, or use those actions to justify shunning or harming individuals who happen to be Muslim, we should shun, avoid, and kill if necessary those who are violently Islamist. To be Islamist is to accept that church and state are one, only Islam is acceptable as the foundation of government, and that in accordance with the teachings of the Koran, all nonbelievers are second-class citizens, to be tolerated at best and forcibly converted and killed if not “People of the Book” — followers of the Abrahamic religions seen as precursors of Islam, notably Christianity and Judaism. Islamists cannot allow other religions to flourish freely, and they believe killing kafir (nonbelievers) can be a righteous act.

Everyone needs to understand the difference: Islamists are a cult of violence and death. They are deadly enemies of freedom, equality for women, homosexuals, and less fundamentalist Muslims. Islamists are evil in the same way Communists and Nazis were evil — they want to rule over everyone and they will kill the innocent to gain power. Islamists delenda est.

But Muslims generally are followers of a religion that is capable of coexistence. Never forget the difference, and understand but don’t excuse the natural tendency of good Muslims to overlook the danger from their fanatical and vicious coreligionists, who are enemies of us all.

Western governments and media are currently run by bien pensant classes who are more worried about the reactions of what they view as the less enlightened, less cosmopolitan parts of their own polities than they are about the Islamists directly working for the death of millions in the West (and Israel.) They are afraid their plans for resettling Muslim refugees to further dilute the influence of nationalists and the religious will be upset if the frogs wake up before the boiling starts. Handwringing about the reasonable reactions of nativists and people who want to maintain Western values leads these political leaders to minimize and distract, oversimplifying issues to reassure the good citizenry that “everything’s fine.” If only you vote for me and not those bad people who want to do something about the real problem!

I have other ideas — see Culture Wars: Co-Existence Through Limited Government

I’ll close with this chilling bit of footage from an imam recently invited to speak by a central Florida mosque. It speaks for itself — the mosque, instead of being appropriately mortified, defends their right to invite this murderous toad of a preacher to speak. Which they have every right to do in the US, and we as citizens have every right to shun the mosque and refuse to permit such hateful visitors to enter.

 

PS — Other good pieces:

— Society is forever threatened by individuals with corrupt hearts by Jeffrey Tucker of FEE.

— Brutal Realities: The only shocking thing about ISIS’s attack on a gay establishment is that it took this long by Bruce Bawer.

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Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness, and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

 

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More reading on other topics:

A Milestone For Women In Politics: Libertarians Reflect on Hillary’s Nomination
Free Trade, Specialization, and Economic Dynamism
Regulation Strangling Innovation: Planes, Trains, and Hyperloop
Captain America and Progressive Infantilization
FDA Wants More Lung Cancer
Jane Jacobs’ Monstrous Hybrids: Guardians vs Commerce
The Great Progressive Stagnation vs. Dynamism
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action is Crippling America
Death by HR: The End of Merit in Civil Service
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Public Employee Unions
Death by HR: History and Practice of Affirmative Action and the EEOC
Civil Service: Woodrow Wilson’s Progressive Dream
Bootleggers and Baptists
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Justice Dept. Extortion
Corrupt Feedback Loops, Goldman Sachs: More Justice Dept. Extortion
Death by HR: The Birth and Evolution of the HR Department
Death by HR: The Simple Model of Project Labor
Levellers and Redistributionists: The Feudal Underpinnings of Socialism
Sons of Liberty vs. National Front
Trump World: Looking Backward
Minimum Wage: The Parable of the Ladder
Selective Outrage
Culture Wars: Co-Existence Through Limited Government
Social Justice Warriors, Jihadists, and Neo-Nazis: Constructed Identities
Tuitions Inflated, Product Degraded, Student Debts Unsustainable
The Morality of Glamour

On Affirmative Action and Social Policy:

Affirmative Action: Chinese, Indian-Origin Citizens in Malaysia Oppressed
Affirmative Action: Caste Reservation in India
Diversity Hires: Pressure on High Tech<a
Title IX Totalitarianism is Gender-Neutral
Public Schools in Poor Districts: For Control Not Education
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
The Social Decay of Black Neighborhoods (And Yours!)
Child Welfare Ideas: Every Child Gets a Government Guardian!
“Income Inequality” Propaganda is Just Disguised Materialism

The greatest hits from SubstrateWars.com (Science Fiction topics):

Fear is the Mindkiller
Mirror Neurons and Irene Gallo
YA Dystopias vs Heinlein et al: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
Selective Outrage
Sons of Liberty vs. National Front
“Tomorrowland”: Tragic Misfire
The Death of “Wired”: Hugo Awards Edition
Hugos, Sad Puppies 3, and Direct Knowledge
Selective Outrage and Angry Tribes
Men of Honor vs Victim Culture
SFF, Hugos, Curating the Best
“Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?”
Science Fiction Fandom and SJW warfare

More reading on the military:

US Military: From No Standing Armies to Permanent Global Power
US Military: The Desegration Experience
The VA Scandals: Death by Bureaucracy