Dr Anjuli Pandavar is a British writer and social critic who holds a PhD in political economy. She was born into a Muslim family in apartheid South Africa, where she left Islam in 1979. Anjuli is preparing to convert to Judaism. She is one of the staunchest defenders of Israel and a constructive critic of the Jewish state when she believes it is warranted. She owns and writes on Murtadd to Human, where she may be contacted.
“Islamonazi” and “Islamofascist” reveal ignorance of Islam, which encompasses much more than Nazism or fascism ever could. Contrary to common assumptions, such terms downplay the nightmare that is Islam. It is easy to fall into seeing Islam as “just another religion” and perceive those of its adherents who wouldn’t hurt a fly as practising a milder variant of the religion of their more bloodthirsty brethren.
Some non-Muslims even do their “moderate” Muslim friends the favour of expelling their “extremist” counterparts out of the category “Muslim” and relegating them to a new category, “Islamists”, who, once so expelled, no longer practise Islam, but “Islamism”. In this simplistic mind-game, the proponents of “Islamism” have yet to identify the Islamist scripture that is not a Muslim scripture, an Islamist ritual that is not a Muslim ritual, the Islamist doctrine that is not a Muslim doctrine, the Islamist prophet who is not the Muslim prophet and the Islamist Allah who is not the Muslim Allah. When they “clarify” that Muslims want to live in peace, while “Islamists” want to take over the state, they merely confirm their ignorance of Islam.
While Islamonazi, Islamofascist and Islamist all betray ignorance of Islam, the difference between the first two and the third is that the first two attempt to show how bad Islam is, while the third tries to show how good Islam is. The first two are honest, but mistaken; the third is deceptive. While the first two seek to be more accurate and fail, the third tries to mislead and succeeds.
Both the error and the ease of deception arise out of a little-understood peculiarity of Islam. In the narrow sense, Islam is a religion with all its sacred texts, precepts, doctrines and rituals. In the broad sense, however, Islam is both the religion and the law, Shari’a, together making for the most robust totalitarian system ever devised. The relationship between these two is one of the three things that give Islam a power that Nazism could never match.
The Islamic ideal
The first generation of Muslims, Muhammad, his family, his companions, his followers and their helpers – the first ummah, is the ideal to be aspired to by all. No historical evidence can be found for any of them, which means they are all mythical, or at least semi-mythical, composed of barbarian archetypes, most likely by Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (661-714), the true Father of Islam. He, as well as successive “scholars,” continued refining Islam over the following centuries into the perfect totalitarian system we know today.
That there are so many variants of the Qur’an and inconsistencies and contradiction within each of them, and that there are so many mutually-contradicting hadiths, probably stem from the difficulty of communicating over the vast distances between the very diverse and insular communities still rapidly being added to the expanding empire. It also highlights the arbitrary power of rulers to make up hadiths as it suited them, thereby modulating the barbarian ideal.
While having to emulate that first generation, however, Muslims also learn that the first generation was the very best that Muslims could ever be, and that each successive generation is progressively worse than the one preceding it, the worst ever being themselves. They are also taught that they are “the best of people” and commanded to live up to that. A Muslim is, therefore, permanently on his toes, never at ease and morally utterly confused. Indeterminate or vague criteria are the basis for arbitrary legal discretion, the hallmark of totalitarianism. In this respect, the Nazis failed, because the criteria for being a good Nazi were crystal clear. Nazism, for all its horror and brutality, was a less than perfect totalitarian system.
This impossibility of ever knowing whether you make the grade, combined with an obligatory belief in the Afterlife, the Ahira, as the real life for which life on earth is but a test and a preparation, forms the basis of Muslim disdain for personal improvement, innovation and technological advancement. It is also the basis of the quest for death, reinforced with promises after death of that which a barbarian values most in life: never-ending sex, explicitly described in the Islamic holy texts (see, e.g., Sunan Ibn Majah 4337).
Another Hadith says: The Messenger of Allah said, “He who does not acquire knowledge with the sole intention of seeking the Pleasure of Allah, but for worldly gain, will not smell the fragrance of Jannah on the Day of Resurrection.” (Riyad as-Salihin 1391)
Heinrich Himmler was to Nazism as Hajjaj ibn Yusuf was to Islam. He turned Hitler’s aspirations into the full-blown ideology of Nazism. Himmler, head of the SS, envied Islam its ideological construct of reward in the Afterlife. While the SS was the equivalent of the Islamic religious police, the Waffen SS was the equivalent of the mujahideen, the jihad mass-murderers, except that the latter were destined for an eternity in a celestial brothel. One Waffen SS soldier described Himmler’s envy:
He loved Islam, which promised Paradise to soldiers who died in combat. No other ideology in the world, not even National Socialism [Nazism], offered that, sublimating death, saying, “If you fall, you will go to Heaven and be surrounded by virgins.” That was Heinrich Himmler.
Even Himmler’s boss, Adolf Hitler, admired Islam and regretted that Germany was not Muslim. “The Mohammedan religion would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”
Islam differentiates between religion, i.e., faith, worship, rituals, etc., and the Islamic telos: all worship for Allah; and the killing of all Jews by the hands of the Muslims as a precondition for commencing the Ahira. Shari’a, the Islamic system of law, exists to accomplish this end and lays out, in minute detail, how Muslims are to be brought to achieving this. Shari’a can only be described as chilling, blood-curdling, repulsive and by other even worse adjectives. It is a legal code so horrific that the “scholars”, the ulema, keep its contents strictly to themselves, never divulging it to lay Muslims, who see and know only the religion part of Islam. They are genuinely ignorant of just how horrific their religion is and they are deliberately kept that way.
Lay Muslims are to concern themselves with punctiliously observing the five personal obligations, ‘five pillars’, of affirming to the creed, praying five time per day, giving alms, fasting during Ramadan and, if they can afford it, going on pilgrimage to Mecca, hajj, once in their lifetime. They are taught only such innocuous laws and doctrines as are required to regiment them, and to ensure social policing, while they are forbidden, in the strictest possible terms, from knowing anything more about their religion than the scholars vouchsafe not “unwise” to share with them.
The communal obligations, such as jihad, are managed by the scholars. They, through imams, select which lay Muslims will do propaganda for Islam, da’wah, jihad of the tongue, and who will become “martyrs”. They arrange the whole package, right down to who will blow themselves up in which crowd and when. Such orchestration takes place in every mosque, Islamic centre and out-of-the-way retreat.
Shari’a defines the Muslim as someone permanently at war with non-Muslims, and the waging of this war is jihad, the sanctification of traditional barbarian raids on neighbouring tribes. Without jihad, there is no Islam. We can then legitimately ask whether, without the killing of all the Jews, Nazism would still be Nazism? The answer to that question is “yes,” because, firstly, carrying out the “Final Solution” is the duty of the Nazi state, not individual Nazis, whereas the responsibility for initiating the Ahira falls to every single Muslim. The genocide hadith reads:
The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Ghargad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews. (Sahih Muslim 6985)
Secondly, jihad is also plunder, and although the Nazis did plunder, plunder was not the basis of their political economy, as discussed below.
The relationship between law and religion
The diabolical genius of Islam in respect of jihad is that it is a communal obligation. Only some Muslims have to do it, for them all to have fulfilled the obligation. But if none of them does it, then all have sinned. Is it then any wonder that “moderate” Muslims never speak up against the killing? If they spoke up, the killers might not get to kill, and they, the “moderates,” will have sinned.
Qur’an 2:216 recognises that not all Muslims are born killers: “Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not.” This consideration Shari’a builds into the jihad obligation, assigning killing to those who are violent and support for the killers to those who are peaceful.
Many in a congregation recognise who is being prepared to take up this warfare. If it is their own son or brother, then depending on how much civilisation they had imbibed, they will either feel proud and support him, or be resigned and look the other way, thus supporting him by withholding information and thereby fulfilling the jihad obligation. There is no such thing as an innocent Muslim, because no Muslim can extricate himself from this unity of religion and law. Whether he kills or not, he is part of fulfilling the obligation to kill. And if the jihad attack succeeds, clearing him of sin, how could he not feel relief? When Hamas committed its October 7 massacre, Muslims around the world rejoiced, cashing in on an obligation spectacularly fulfilled.
Like Islamic martyrdom, entry to the Waffen SS was by selection, but Nazism never sought to involve every Nazi in the killing at some level. The extermination of the Jews took place in greatest secrecy, and most of those who carried it out did so without the benefit of childhood indoctrination. The offspring of the Waffen SS, indeed, did have their equivalent of the Muslim madrassas, but it all ended much too early for them to create the next generation. Only those who were little children in the late 1920s may have had enough Nazi indoctrination to know no reality other than Nazism, and some of these remained committed Nazis to the end of their days, like practically all Muslims remain Muslim to the end of their days.
For a totalitarian system to persist from one generation to the next, requires at least one complete generation to have known nothing but totalitarianism from cradle to grave. Nazism died not so much because its factories had been destroyed, but because its means of ideological reproduction had been destroyed. It had started with the second half of one generation and ended with the first half of the next. The Nazi state tried to make the best of a bad situation. According to Hilke Lorenz, a journalist and author who researches the Nazi indoctrination of children:
The National Socialist state needed new blood, also in the form of soldiers. So it wanted to win over adults who, after all, were the voters. But at the same time, it also had to win over the next generation, which in any case, it could educate in this spirit right from the start. So it was only logical to address young people and get them on its side. ...The Hitler Youth movement... was fundamentally a building block in the great plan of binding children and adolescents to the National Socialist state. ...There are numerous stories of children from communist or Social Democrat homes also being equally as wild about the uniforms. This led to conflicts within families, which the Nazis certainly didn't find inopportune. In this way they were able to split children from their parents.
One such child, Günter Lucks, whose parents were committed communists, spent many months badgering his father to allow him to join the Hitler Youth. Lucks recalls his relief when the Nazis finally forced his father to sign him up:
I was in the Hitler Youth and that was important. The war was something secondary. I was glad about it, though. What a pity I'm still small, I thought. I’d love to be a soldier and march into Poland with the others. I already had the Nazi ideology in my head.
Islam has no such problems. In the Islamic world, parents freely send their children to madrassa (Qur’an school, Shari’a school) for Islamic indoctrination. In many of these countries parents seek out madrassas with the most brutal teachers who will savagely beat their children, fearing that they themselves may not be strict enough to terrorise Islamic discipline into them. Gazan parents queue up to enrol their children in Hamas summer camps. Hitler should have been so lucky.
Contemporary Islam is experiencing the same ideological reproduction problem to keep its totalitarian system going as had beset the Nazis trying to get their totalitarian system going. All Muslim countries are running up against the demographic equivalent of an unstoppable force hitting an immovable object: a generation exposed to the wider world in a milieu predicted on insulation from that world. The problem is most acute in the Gulf states of Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, where the worldly youth make up more than half the population and half of them, women, are suddenly demanding access to the economy.
Islam is not made for such people. It is no surprise that three of the Gulf states are at the forefront of efforts to “reform towards moderate Islam,” a euphemism for dismantling Islam, led by none other than Saudi Arabia. The country’s current young generation will raise the generation that will not “hear and obey” (Qur’an 24:51), and so will be unsuitable for Islam. Muslim countries like Qatar, Brunei, Turkey and Iran may keep a tight grip on their current young generation, but they are well aware of the rising pressure under the lid. It only means that the social revolution that some are sensibly trying to manage, other’s will have to crisis-manage.
This oversimplification is meant to highlight that there are demographic similarities between Islam and Nazism, but that there are important differences within those similarities.
The political economy of Islam
Finally, the political economy of Nazism is predicated on a work ethic of industriousness and improvement in the nation’s material conditions. The more is produced today, the longer a society can sustain itself into the future. But the more efficiently they produce, the less they need to work to achieve the same sustenance. The pressure for efficiency is absent from Islamic societies, tying back to the Islamic ideal discussed above and its consequence, disdain for this life and distaste for love of life, hence the proud boast, “We love death more than you love life”. Qur’an 10:107 sanctifies the resulting fatalism:
If Allah afflicteth thee with some hurt, there is none who can remove it save Him; and if He desireth good for thee, there is none who can repel His bounty. He striketh with it whom He will of his bondmen. He is the Forgiving, the Merciful.
A scene in the 1962 David Lean film Lawrence of Arabia, depicts Arab horsemen armed with swords attacking a Turkish airplane strafing them. They keep on attacking the plane overhead until those not yet mowed down give up in bewilderment, their dead brothers strewn all around them, the plane already a dot in the distance. Allah did not ordain victory for them that day. Perhaps next time, insha-Allah.
The term “Islamonazis” implies that Islam is so bad that it can be likened to Nazism. But this is not comparing like with like. Their industrial society equipped the Nazis to much more efficiently carry out their genocide, that is, they could kill many more in a much shorter time, than the atomised, progress-averse Muslims every could. Over the 1400 years of Islam, jihad is estimated to have killed between 200 and 250 million people.
Questions immediately arise: How many could Muslims have killed, if they had an industrial society? How much would the Nazis have killed, equipped only with horses and swords? How long would the Nazis have been able to keep it up? Was every Nazi as gleeful in killing as every Gazan was on October 7? Did all of Germany break out in spontaneous celebration when they learnt of the death camps. Was it a triumph that nothing could ever take away from them?
The truth is that at the end of a hard day’s killing, the Nazis had to get blind drunk in order to be able to sleep at night. The Nazis were barbaric, no question about it, but they did not have a patch on Hamas. To call Hamas “Islamonazis” is to downplay their horrors.
Still, like everyone else, Muslims have to live, and if they do not produce the means of life, then they have to get it somewhere else. Both the Qur’an (Chapter 8, “The Spoils of War”) and the Shari’a deal with this problem. Islamic political economy is predicated on the Muslim living at the expense of the non-Muslim. Islamic economy plunders the economies of the non-Muslims in several ways: raiding the “people of the towns”, murdering whoever they could not capture, seizing their property and taking the women and children as slaves (the most recent example being the October 7 raid into Israel); extorting tribute from vassal states (the Arab League syphoning the European Union); raiding caravans and merchant ships (Somali pirates); and extracting jizya, “protection money”, from Jews and Christians.
A contemporary proleptic jizya is Muslim immigrants bleeding Western welfare coffers dry, and extorting money from Hindus in India, Jews in Israel’s “mixed” cities and Christians across the Middle East.
While those plundered continued producing, they continued to be plundered, forcing them into steady decline until their condition became so dire that it became preferable to convert to Islam and at least earn part of the spoils of plundering others further afield. If Muslim immigrants get their way, this will be the fate of every Western country naïve enough to welcome Muslim immigrants.
This parasitic form of political economy is by its nature incapable of supporting social improvement. Islamic society consumes not as it produces, but as it plunders, obviating any need for human development of any kind, save the ability to fight, plus whatever is needed to raise the next generation to fighting age.
Mosul Eye recalled the tense early days of ISIS rule on campus—and the debate over Shakespeare. ISIS wanted to ban the Bard. “One professor argued that’s how we teach English,” Mosul Eye told me. “ISIS asked us, ‘But what could Shakespeare teach Muslims? He can’t teach them how to fight [in the cause of Allah, AP].’” (“Mosul’s library without books”)
Those Muslims with an aptitude for converting money into capital find themselves hemmed in on all sides by a myriad of obstructive laws (prohibition on interest, liquidatory inheritance laws, exclusion of half the workforce from the economy, prohibition on Muslim subordination to non-Muslims, etc.) that make such conversion well-nigh impossible, and ensure that plunder remains the principle form of economy, the essential skills for which are deceitfulness, ruthlessness, quickness to violence and obsequiousness, thus perpetuating the atomised nature of tribal culture. Systemic corruption is the natural outcome of this.
The late eighteenth century saw a revitalised Europe and the appearance on the scene of the United States bring effective resistance to Muslim raids and an end to the ability of the last caliphate, the Ottomans, to continue expanding as it exhausted ever-widening circles of lands through over-plunder. The misery that had been more or less confined to the peasant farmers of the Middle East and what remained of the dhimmis, started creeping up the social scale towards the nobility centred on the Court and the upper echelons of the military and the bureaucracy. The Sublime Porte had been set on its way to becoming the sick man of Europe, while a deformed middle class began emerging in Constantinople, later to become the nucleus of the Turkish nation-state.
Insult was added to injury when infidel Europe not only started hiving off chunks of “Muslim land” as colonies, but forced the Muslims, both in those colonies and in the declining Ottoman Caliphate itself, to abolish the Dhimma, the contract and institution of dhimmitude, and slavery. These were affronts to every level of Muslim society, especially the poorest, who till then had been able to maintain their supremacism by abusing and robbing Jews and Christians.
The first reprieve came in the early twentieth century with the discovery of oil in the Middle East. The only problem was that the Middle East was still Muslim, and the only conceivable form of economy was plunder, and that is exactly what they did. They plundered their own vast oil resources, rather than turn them into capital to develop their societies. Social development not being a Muslim priority, the newfound wealth went conspicuous consumption for the elites and jihad for the rest.
Islam is a religion of barbarians, by barbarians, for barbarians, which is why it appealed to the Turkic tribes and the Mongols, who embraced it freely, and were then enabled to plunder all the more effectively. The Nazis were simply not barbarian enough to plunder everyone around them and themselves into penury.
Conclusion
Describing Hamas as “Islamonazi” or “Islamofascist” shares with describing them as “barbarians” that they are all expressions of rage. Hamas are barbarians, but if those who described them as such on October 7 had any idea of what they were talking about, then every horror and sadistic cruelty Hamas has since perpetrated would have been anticipated as to be expected of barbarians. Instead, every subsequent barbaric act elicited the same shock, the same surprise, the same revulsion as if such acts were taking place for the first time. In their psychological war, Hamas carried out exactly the same attack on the Jewish psyche every time, gruesome cruelty, achieving the same success every time.
This is not all Hamas’s doing. The Arabs knew how to add a force multiplier to Israel’s social dislocation in the wake of the Yom Kippur War and the frenzied efforts to undermine successive Israeli governments after Menachem Begin had become Prime Minister. The Arabs saw how eagerly Israelis fell for the Oslo Accords and how Jews ethnically cleansed themselves from Gaza. They see how desperate Jews are to have Arabs in their Knesset and how good that makes them feel about themselves. Those Arab MKs can openly support “the Resistance” inside Israel’s Knesset and the Jews will do nothing to them. Subhanallah. All of this is ammunition for their psychological war on the Jews.
The term “Islamonazi” seems in the ascendant. It issues from the union of outrage and ignorance. It misleads as to the nature of reality and misguides in the formulation of policy and the determination of action. “Barbarians” is the only accurate term. Israelis, however, have no idea how accurate, and hence useful, this term is.
If you want the world to know how you feel about Hamas, then call them barbarians, rather than “Islamonazis,” take your terminology seriously, and then get ready to fight back in ways that are effective against barbarians.
