The Devilfish of Islamofascism

In Toilers of the Sea, one of Victor Hugo's lesser-known novels, is a marvelous description of how to defeat an enemy that is insidious by its nature, an enemy that has served as a symbol of the banal parasitism of evil. Towards the end of the novel, Gilliatt, the hero, is seized in an underwater cave by a devilfish, or octopus. The creature's tentacles cling to Gilliatt, and it is about to pierce his chest with its beak:

"The devilfish is cunning. It first tries to stupefy its prey. It seizes, then waits as long as it can.

Gilliatt held his knife. The suction increased.

All at once the creature detached its sixth tentacle from the rock, launched it at him, and attempted to seize his left arm….At the same time, it thrust its head forward swiftly….

But Gilliatt was on his guard. Being watched, he watched.

Gilliatt plunged the point of his knife into the flat, viscous mass, and with a twisting movement similar to the flourish of a whip, describing a circle around the two eyes, he tore out the head as one wrenches out a tooth.

It was finished. The whole creature dropped….The four hundred suckers simultaneously released their hold of the rock and the man.

This rag sank to the bottom."

It is a passage our leaders ought to be made to read and learn from if they wish to successfully prosecute the "war against terrorism." The advocates and promulgators of Islamofascism, like the devilfish, stupefy their prey, and wait, then strike. Missing from the real life dilemma is a Gilliatt. President Bush is not one, nor is Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. They attack the tentacles but, in the name of tolerance, refuse to cut off the head.

As many contributors to this publication have pointed out, most recently and succinctly by Dr. Edwin Locke and Alex Epstein in their penetrating "The Terrorists' Motivation: Islam," the trouble is not that killers have "hijacked a peaceful religion." The trouble is that Islam is not, in its fundamental tenets (if its virulent injunctions can be called "principles"), a "peaceful" religion. It is a manifesto for the conquest and destruction of all Western civilization and the establishment of a global anti-man, anti-mind theocracy.

It pursues this goal, it should be apparent by now, by employing two methods: with immediate, violent action, such as indiscriminate bombings; and by an osmotic process of invading a Western country with a fifth column that works to alter Western laws to tolerate its presence, while at the same time preaching the abandonment of those laws in favor of law based on an intolerant Koran.

The Koran cannot be compromised, repudiated piecemeal, or "modified" so that it posed no threat to the West. It cannot be "secularized" without destroying Islam. Islam can no more be "perverted" or "hijacked" than can Nazism, Fascism, or Japanese Bushido. Islamic clerics know this, as well as rank-and-file Muslims, which is why they are largely silent on the matter of terrorism, with the exception of an occasional equivocating expression of public regret for the bombings.

The most serious problem is that the current conflict is being treated as a mere "war against terrorism." It has devolved into a mere cops-and-robbers manhunt for terrorists and suspected terrorists and their cells. It may was well be put on a par with a campaign to stamp out "violent bank robberies."

This is not to deprecate the heroic efforts of Britain's authorities in tracking down the London "Islamikazies" of 7/7, which includes a "shoot to kill" standing order and the suspension of "racial profiling" to identify suspects. But that is merely rounding up and obstructing the "foot soldiers" of the Islamafascists. The parties guilty of associating with the 7/7 bombers, and with the ones who botched a second round of London bombings and who are on the run, can be replaced, according to a British report, from among 16,000 militant British Muslims.

It would be interesting to know how many American Muslims are willing to don rucksacks and commit the same sabotage here. It is possible that such a report has been written and circulated among those agencies charged with identifying and "neutralizing" such "activists." But, for fear of offending American Muslims, very likely President Bush has forbidden its publication.

If we are at war with an insidious ideology, why limit our self-preservation actions to policing an invading army, while neglecting the goals and ends of its leaders?

The octopus head of Islamofascism is: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. To a lesser extent, one must include Pakistan and even Afghanistan, since the Taliban are apparently still active in both those countries and the heads of those countries are impotent or unwilling to eradicate it. Most of the madrasses in Pakistan are subsidized by Saudi Arabia, are a chief source of suicide bombers. One might argue that Iraq was a good starting place to eradicate our enemy. But why the U.S. should be expending lives and fortune to establish a "democratic" government there, beggars explanation and reason. After Saddam Hussein and his government had been overthrown, we should have moved on to Syria or Iran and let the Iraqis sort out what to do next. We are under no moral obligation to help anyone discover the benefits of Western institutions, not at the price of sacrificing American lives, American wealth, and American liberties, which is what is occurring now.

Our leaders must recognize that the head must be lopped off before any substantive progress can be made against alien or resident terrorists. Until they learn that lesson, the bombings and killings and mayhem will continue unabated. The devilfish has watched, waited, and struck repeatedly ever since the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. It has taken the measure of our resolve and of our ignorance. It is neither shocked nor awed.

Now, a very strange thing happened when Admiral Karl Donitz arranged the German surrender to the Allies in 1945; the European war was over.

Another strange thing happened when General Douglas MacArthur received the Japanese surrender on the battleship Missouri in 1945; the Pacific war was ended.

And a third strange thing occurred when World War Two was declared over and became history; the Allies ceased worrying that the war would continue within the borders of their own countries.

The heads were lopped off, the tentacles died when the primitive brain that guided them was gone, and the rags of Nazism and Bushido sank to the bottom.

Whatever fifth columnists and sympathizers existed in the U.S. and Britain did not carry on the fight for Nazism or the Emperor after German and Japanese governments had surrendered and were reconstituted. Many Nazis fled justice to South America, to Egypt, and other safe havens. And the Allies did not wring their hands over "human rights" and trials until after the war, in Nuremberg. Then it was the rights of the millions of murdered that concerned the judges, not the rights of the accused members of the governments guilty of those crimes.

The same thing would happen to Islam, if the West had enough self-esteem and resolve to fight the war as it should be fought: by taking the war to the enemy. Islam would scurry back into its self-made Dark Age and pose no threat to those who wished to live without vengeful mullahs and imams looking over their shoulders. Muslims who chose to remain in the West would need to learn to submit to Western laws of individual rights and the separation of church and state. If they do not choose to submit to those laws, they should be invited to emigrate to those nations whose ethics and society are more fitting to their refusal to think.

Whatever Islamic terrorist cells might exist in the U.S., Britain, France and other Western nations, would wither away for lack of funding, guidance and even purpose. They would not and could not "carry on the fight."

Where would the West be today if Churchill and Roosevelt were stupefied and adopted the Bush/Blair philosophy of fighting an enemy intent on conquest? Where would we be if they had restricted their combat operations to fighting saboteurs, provocateurs and secret agents on the "home front"? Where would we be if they had not judged Nazism and Bushido as inimical to Western civilization?

Would we have won World War Two if we had "tolerated" Nazism and Japanese imperialism as multiculturalist "peers" of our own political system, and merely sought to prevent their saboteurs from bombing schools and subways? Would we have won if we regarded Nazism as just another "belief system" that was "hijacked" by Hitler?

Where would the West be today if Churchill and Roosevelt had adopted the Bush/Blair method of confronting our enemies?

I am certain of this: I would not be asking these questions. I might not be. I might have been liquidated for refusing to bow to the Emperor or to shout "Sieg heil!"

And I have ample proof of my possible fate should I refuse to bow to Mecca. That is why I will not discard my knife of reason and my love of existence.

Edward Cline is a novelist who has written on the revolutionary war period. He is author of the Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the Revolutionary period, the detective novel First Prize, the suspense novel Whisper the Guns, and of numerous published articles, book reviews and essays.