-- Amil Imani

Diffusing the present dangerous confrontation between Islam and the West demands rational impartial and cool heads to untangle facts from myth, understand the Muslims’ mindset, and redress any grievances on either side. The Muslims’ perennial complaint is that the imperialist West—all colonial powers of the past, as well as the United States of America—have victimized them for decades and even centuries and continue to do so in every conceivable way. The litany of the alleged wrongdoings by the West is encyclopedic.

The terror and death inflicted on humanity is not the work of radical Islam, neither the political Islam, nor the militant Islam. It is Islam, period. Get it? And the perpetrators are not fringe elements confined to brainwashed Saudis, loony Taliban, or some know--nothing Pakistanis who have hijacked Islam and are now in the business of mass murder. The latest project of the practitioners of the “religion of peace,” aimed to blowing planeloads of innocent civilians to smithereens in midair over the Atlantic, - ought to finally drive the point home: It is Islam, dummy. Get it? How could people calling themselves sincere God-fearing religionists bring themselves to even think of acts of such barbarity, yet plan them methodically and cold-bloodedly proceed to execute them?

Islam enjoys a large and influential ally among the non-Muslims: A new generation of “Useful Idiots,” the sort of people Lenin identified living in liberal democracies who furthered the work of communism. This new generation of Useful Idiots also live in liberal democracies, but serves the cause of Islamofascism—another virulent form of totalitarian ideology.

Useful Idiots are naïve, they are foolish, they are ignorant of facts, they are unrealistically idealistic, they are dreamers and they are willfully in denial or deceptive. They hail from the ranks of the chronically unhappy. They are anarchists, they are aspiring revolutionaries, they are neurotics who are at war with life, the disaffected alienated from government, corporations, and just about any and all institutions of society. The Useful Idiot can be a billionaire, a movie star, an academe of renown, a politician, or from any other segment of the population.

The world is presently at its most wicked. It is beyond human help. It requires only a nudge to implode and prepare for the divine ruler, the Saheb-ul-Zaman (the Mahdi, the Lord of the Age) to come and set it aright. It is the sacred duty and privilege of every Muslim to do all he can to hasten the death of the old world and the birth of the global Islamic Ummah. Thus goes the thinking of Iran’s ruling mullahs and their hand-picked president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It seems like the old millennialism thinking, a belief held, in one version or another by major religions. Indeed it is, with one terribly alarming difference.

We, the non-Muslims—the infidels, heathens, unbelievers, apostates, enemies of Allah, najis (soiled), as you prefer to call us—would like to know what it is that you don’t understand and what it is that makes you behave so badly toward us? You blame us for your problems and believe if we embrace Islam and help establish the Islamic Ummeh the earth would be cleansed of us, transformed to paradise, and all your problems disappear. Respectfully, we disagree. We believe that you and your system of belief are at the core of your problems; that you need to critically examine the facts rather than conveniently blame others for your ills. Keep in mind that beliefs and ideas make people human, that beliefs are roadmaps of life. To the extent that the roadmap is rational and enlightened, the path of life is illumined, pitfalls are avoided and obstacles are removed. The terrain of life has greatly changed since the roadmap of Islam was given to the wandering primitives of the Arabian Peninsula. 

A long long time ago, God created the first human -- Adam. God loved the little fellow so much that he made him somewhat in his own image. The Lord, out of his infinite kindness, built a magnificent Garden that contained all the good things that any fellow would ever desire for his little favorite. Things were fine for a while. Adam lived and poked about in the Garden and God had a fun time watching him. Even living in the Garden of Eden can become unattractive, after a while. All play and no work. Eating to your gut's content and sleeping to your body's limpness. That's no life, that's condemnation to boredom.