Interview with Alexandre del Valle about Islamist Totalitarianism

Three questions for Alexandre del Valle about: Islamist Totalitarianism – Attack on Democracies

Information Juive: Alexandre del Valle, a year has passed since the 11 September. Do you think that Islamist totalitarianism constitutes a danger for Western democracies? ADV: A year after the attacks of the 11 September the outcome of the fight against Islamist totalitarianism is damning. Despite the success of the immutable operation Freedom and the overthrowing of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the terrorist network has remained practically unaffected. Ossama Bin Laden remains at large (maybe he is even dead but this does not change anything as one hundred of other Bin Ladens are already active) and the main members of the organization managed to flee to Pakistan, to the Balkans, to Indonesia, the Gulf states or even Europe and there they have been reorganising their networks and recruiting their preachers. Contrary to the accepted idea, the World Trade Center tragedy has not stirred up a general movement of awareness of the Islamist danger in the West. The Islamic fundamentalists continue to preach, organize themselves, convert and recruit without restraint in Europe and in the United States, while in Israel they continue to attack and terrorise the civilian population by using the human bombs. Information Juive: By saying this do you mean that the 11 September has not set off within the Western consciousness the necessary awareness of the fact that the totalitarianism has declared the war on democracies? That it started with Israel and the United States and also Europe, and that it is far from showing any signs of being stifled anywhere in the world? ADV: Western people do not yet seem to have realized that the Islamist danger does not limit itself simply to terrorist chaos. Before embodying itself into human bombs or before embodying itself into the form of backward and criminal states such as Sudan or Afghanistan of the Talibans, Islamist totalitarianism has been, above all, an ideology of mass destruction, a pathologically anti-Westerm, anti-Jewish and anti-Christian fanaticism. It has been a new hate-teaching despite the fact that it continuously wraps itself in the cloak of the “right to the difference” and of communalism.. Information Juive: How would you define this new danger of radical Islamism which is both ideological and terrorist? ADV: Islamism is not simply what our nice, politically correct and Islamophilic voices like to compare it to, that is, a simple religious fundamentalism similar to, on account of the interconnection between the “three Abrahamic religions”, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant fundamentalisms. Of course, one has every right to criticize “all” the fundamentalisms but nobody can dare to assert that the Lubavich Jews, the Catholics of Opus Dei or the American Amish are of the same kind as the Kamikazes of Bin Laden, Hizbullah or Hamas. Any such comparison would be simply misleading and would prevent us from showing the Islamist danger objectively. In reality, radical Islamism is a Totalitarianism, an ideology of mass destruction, a politico-religious imperialist and global fanaticism comparable more to the former Stalinist and Nazi totalitarianisms than to other religious – Jewish, Christian or even Buddhist or Hindu – fundamentalisms. For no other religious “fundamentalism” is as much universally criminal, globally barbaric, aggressively proselytising, fundamentally theocratic as is Islamism. Sure, in the past Christianity could sometimes adopt totalitarian forms. As for Judaism, it also showed some conquering, nay, militant tendencies. But Judaism as well as Christianity underwent reforms and aggiornamento*, and evolutions. Christianity appears to have renounced anti-Semitism and aggressive proselytising. Judaism, on the other hand, never really practised proselytising and relies partly on the art of reinterpretation of the sacred texts. But the dominant orthodox Islam, that of Mecca and that of al-Azhar, has, unfortunately, been frozen since the 10th century. The Koran that teaches, among other things, armed Jihad against the Infidels, still remains “the living word of God”. Finally, what made Islamism transform itself into totalitarianism, as Bernard Lewis explains, had its source in the consecutive events following the decolonisation, the creation of Israel, and the “humiliation” of 1976, and later the Khomeinist revolution of 1979 which sounded the knell of the “return of the old conquering Islam”. It is a “return of Islam” as a kind of explosive post-colonial, “anti-Imperialist” and particularly anti-Zionist revenge. Just like Nazism in Germany of the 30s, the Islamist totalitarianism offers to solve all the evils in the Muslim countries by establishing the Shariah – the Islamic law and by settling a score with the Western “Imperialist” infidel Judeo-Crusaders as well as with their “seides”**, that is, with tolerant and liberal Muslims – the primary victims of “green fascism” which is, briefly speaking, is the ideology of total hatred of the other, the classical paranoid theory of scapegoating – hence the Islamists' rehabilitation of the texts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kampf. Contrary to Nazism or Stalinism, the Green Totalitarianism is the first totalitarianism which does not come from the “white Judeo-Christians; it is the first “exotic” totalitarianism with origins in the South even if its primary victims are none other but Muslims themselves. That's why it speaks in the name of victims, of the “oppressed” of the Third World and the “humiliated ones” of the Arab world. Its ultimate goal is nothing else but the new final solution of the democratic West and the free world. After the red totalitarianism – founded on the notion of the struggle of classes; the brown totalitarianism – founded on the notions of the struggle of races; there comes the green one – founded on the notion of the struggle of religions and civilizations. In this meticulous inquiry Alexandre del Valle draws up the extent of the Islamist penetration in Europe and in the United States which ought to be the cause for anxiety. Dependant on the petrol-producing Islamic lobby of the Gulf states, muzzled by the need to be Islamically correct and fooled by the rhetoric of victimhood and communalism of the Islamist organizations, the Western leaders have failed their fight against the terrorism. The supporters of Bin Laden have been spreading their influence, little by little, using the subversive strategy peculiar to the revolutionary movements. By analysing, with precision, the resilience of this new totalitarism, the author lifts the lid off the major taboo – the notion of the Islamically correct; and demonstrates when exactly the democracies become suicidal every time they afford freedom of expression to the enemies of that freedom.